KEROUAC’S SCROLL
A novel
Charles Deemer
Copyright © 2011 by Charles Deemer
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Contact Charles Deemer at: cdeemer at yahoo dot com.
Originally published by Sextant Books in 2006
http://www.sextantbooks.com
For Brad and Kass
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road
We carry our death masks inside our minds.
–Simon Goldhill, Love, Sex & Tragedy
PART ONE:
EROS
I am not now and never have been a pedophile. I need to get this straight from the start. But here’s the rub: saying so, denying the most heinous charge that can be made against a man’s character, becomes, in the strange logic used by some shrinks, evidence of guilt. To protest your innocence is to reveal a state of denial, and the more outraged you become of a false accusation, the more convinced certain trespassers of the mind are of your guilt. If you are charged with pedophilia, you are guilty until proven innocent. And so it was to prove my innocence that shortly after my 70th birthday I decided to drive across the country and confront my accuser.
1: The Proposal
I often think about Red Hooker. A man is not your closest friend for half a century without becoming a kind of spiritual appendage, a silent accomplice to everything you feel and do. We’d gone through significant deaths together (our parents) and five marriages and divorces (his advantage, 3-2). Even though we’d never lived in the same city until recently, we’d kept in constant contact on the phone and in letters from the day I got discharged from the Army shortly before him in 1959. We’d both served as Russian linguists in the Army Security Agency at the height of the Cold War.
Hooker and I regarded one another as brothers and were far closer than he was to his biological sibling. It went without saying that one of us was going to bury the other unless somehow we went out together in a blaze of glory, and when on my 70th birthday Red suggested a road trip across the country, I wondered if this was what he had in mind.
I hadn’t celebrated a birthday in years but this one, falling on a Saturday in August, at least embraced company. Hooker and I had been sharing Saturday breakfasts at Nobby’s Bar & Grill ever since he joined me in Portland, Oregon, in 2001, saying he needed to be closer to a modern VA hospital than living in the Idaho outback afforded. Compared to our new facility, the Spokane VA hospital, which was the closest one to him, was a relic. Besides, he admitted, it would be nice living out our old age together as neighbors.
We hadn’t missed a weekly breakfast since his arrival, more often than not at Nobby’s because the back bar used to be one of my drinking holes and the owner was a friend. I wasn’t about to cancel an established ritual just because it was my birthday. Hooker wouldn’t remember it anyway.
A tad before seven, I picked up Hooker at the boarding house where he rented a room. Nobby’s was on the downtown side of the river in my neighborhood in northwest Portland, which I’d seen change in the name of progress from thrift stores and small taverns to boutiques and expensive restaurants. This wasn’t progress as far as I was concerned, and Nobby’s was one of the few places in the neighborhood that resembled what it had been a quarter-century ago. Another was the square brick building in which I rented two bedrooms (one converted to an office), where only the rent had changed.
After breakfast I was surprised when Hooker passed me an envelope that obviously contained a card. Despite being close, we had a mutual disregard for the formal exchange of gifts. I don’t recall either of us ever giving the other a birthday present, and our Christmas exchanges during half-a-century of friendship could be counted on one hand. Instead of exchanging gifts, we bought one another drinks. At least during our drinking days.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Open it.”
But it wasn’t a birthday card at all. Apparently it was a card to send off a traveler on a trip because it showed an airplane skywriting “Bon Voyage!” in a sky filled with balloons and birds. As I opened the card, a newspaper clipping fell out.
I retrieved it. A small headline read, “Kerouac’s Scroll Begins National Tour.”
Hooker said, “I think we should go see it.”
The Kerouac scroll was the original manuscript of his most famous book, On the Road. Jack Kerouac had written the novel on one continuous roll of teletype paper, which he had guided through his manual typewriter during several frenzied weeks in 1951. This much I remembered. What I didn’t know was that the scroll still existed, measured 120-feet in length, and recently had been bought at auction by the owner of the Indianapolis Colts for over 2 million dollars. The owner was sharing the scroll with America by putting it on a five-year tour, which would begin in a few weeks with a late summer-stay at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
When I looked up from the article, Hooker asked, “When do you want to leave?”
“You’re not serious.”
“Of course I’m serious.”
I glanced back down at the article. Surely the tour would come to Seattle, which was considerably closer than Washington, D.C. But the closest it came to the Pacific Northwest was San Francisco, which was several years away. At our ages, one or both of us could be dead by then.
Hooker said, “You don’t have anything better to do this summer,” his tone suggesting he was stating the obvious.
“I was going to start a novel.”
A retired English professor, a playwright, a screenwriter, I had been threatening to begin a novel for most of my life. Novelists, I had decided some time ago, were the real writers, which was partly a ploy to soften my sense of failure as a playwright and the frustration of wealthy anonymity as a screenwriter. If people knew of me at all, it was as a teacher, not a writer.
“Write your novel on the road,” Hooker said. “Bring that laptop of yours. On the way back, maybe we can even do some sightseeing. I want to go to the U.P.”
“The upper peninsula of Michigan?”
“Calumet, to be exact.” Then he sang, if Hooker’s off-tone voice could be called singing: “In Calumet, Michigan, in the copper country.”
The line was from Woody Guthrie’s song, 1913 Massacre. Hooker had introduced me to Guthrie’s music fifty years ago.
“You want to go to Calumet because of the song?”
“That’s not good enough a reason? Actually I have a personal one. That’s where my brother ended up.”
Hooker, who often called me brother, almost never talked about his younger brother, Clyde.
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Why are you asking so many goddamn questions? Do you want to go or not? Because I’m going anyway.”
Clearly he didn’t want to talk about his brother. I didn’t know how Hooker would manage to take the long trip on his own. His old age wasn’t as financially secure as mine, and he didn’t own a car. His last years in the real estate business had been marked by bankruptcy. As near as I could tell, he barely made it on his Social Security check, which was why he lived in a rooming house and why I always picked up the tab at our Saturday breakfasts.
“I think you mean it,” I said.
“I’m seeing Kerouac’s scroll if I have to hitchhike to get there. I’m surprised you don’t feel the same.”
“Who says I don’t?”
“You don’t act very enthusiastic.”
“I’m recovering from the shock of the proposal. Do I get the rest of the day to think about it?”
“Why not?” After a silence, Hooker said, “We’ve always threatened to take a long road trip together.”
“As I recall, the last time this came up we were in our forties. And still drinking.”
“Better late than never.”
“This is an ambitious trip for two old farts,” I said. “I have to think about it.”
“I’m going with or without you, brother.”
“I believe you. Give me until tomorrow.”
2: The Letter
My mail is junk mail. I’ve outlived almost all of my friends, and neither of my two ex-wives has talked to me in decades. My social security and retirement checks are automatically deposited. I no longer have an agent, and Hollywood no longer calls to bribe me into turning a terrible movie script into an acceptable one. A theater company hasn’t written to ask for royalties information since I retired from the university. My mail, in other words, is not something worth looking at. Typically I empty the mail box, look quickly through the credit card offers, medical insurance offers, and whatever other unsolicited benefits have reached my doorstep as I step inside to the trash can to deposit them.
After the early breakfast on my 70th birthday, however, a letter among the junk mail stopped me in my tracks. Its return address was a detective agency in Seattle that I had hired almost a year ago to find my estranged daughter. I hadn’t heard from them in so long I had forgotten they might still be working for me.
Stephanie was born some 40 years ago. I’d married Helen because I’d knocked her up during my senior year at UCLA but had left the marriage before Stephanie was a year old. Although I had not deserted Helen for another woman, before our divorce was final I’d become enamored with a colleague in graduate school, a tall blonde folklorist named Sally. Shortly after getting our graduate degrees, an MFA for me and a Ph.D. for Sally, we married and moved to Chesapeake on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to join the English faculty at a small liberal arts college.
In the summer of 1972, Helen let Stephanie come east to spend a part of the summer with us. This, as it turned out, was the last time I’d see my daughter. She was eight years old, a dark-haired pudgy girl with a premature double chin, who bore no resemblance to me that I could decipher. Apparently Stephanie’s later report of our lifestyle, which involved hosting and going to frequent faculty parties at which considerable amounts of liquor were consumed, combined with Helen’s reborn Christianity to conclude that I was a sinful influence on my daughter. Helen no longer cooperated when I requested to visit Stephanie, and for a variety of reasons, all of them self-centered, I didn’t fight her resistance. Stephanie and I still corresponded, if irregularly, but when she became a teenager, hearing from a distant father interested her less. In time, we drifted apart.
After retirement, I felt great guilt about having lost contact with my daughter. I no longer knew where she was, or where Helen was for that matter. I’d heard through mutual friends that Helen had remarried and later that she was the minister at some fundamentalist church or other. I shuddered at the notion. Was Stephanie also a reborn Christian or had she escaped the nest in time to find a more tolerant way of dealing with spiritual matters? Who the hell was this product of my loins, my daughter, anyway? I hired a detective agency to look for her so I might find out.
At first the detective assigned to the case, a gruff-sounding man (at least on the telephone) named Hank Brownell, sounded optimistic. With the Internet today, you could track down just about anyone, he assured me. But I had precious little information to give him and none at all that was recent. He remained optimistic. Then slowly he backed away from this position, writing instead of phoning to keep me up to date on his efforts, sometimes to ask for another check if I wanted to continue.
He had not asked for money in months, so I assumed the search was over. Yet here was a letter from him. When I opened it on the porch, I found a cover letter and a small envelope with a handwritten return address from College Park, Maryland. I didn’t recognize the handwriting.
If this was a birthday present, I wasn’t prepared for it. Beyond the porch, the day was beginning for my neighbors, many of whom I knew by name. Mr. Arnold was carrying his briefcase to the nearby bus stop. Mrs. Wilson, a recent widow, was fetching the morning paper, still in her robe, her white hair a fright. Looking down at my mail, I saw that my hand was shaking. I rushed inside to learn the news in the privacy of home.
I took the mail into the kitchen. My heart exploded when I read Brownell’s cover letter. He’d found her! She had written me a letter, which was enclosed. I tore open the envelope.
Dear Robert,
Hello. I really don’t know where to start with this letter. It has come to my attention that you have been trying to get in touch with me. I don’t know why, after all these years, you have an interest in me. I can only assume that you are trying to make amends for the past.
However, I am not at all ready to make amends with you. About 3 years ago I had a memory recall regarding my visit with you in Maryland. In that recall I remembered an incident of sexual abuse that occurred between you and I. It has taken me a long time to begin coming to terms with this memory, though I have absolutely no doubt that the incident did, in fact, take place.
I want no part of you! I am asking that you respect my boundaries and stay away.
Sincerely,
Stephanie
Needless to say, I was stunned. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a pedophile. Nonetheless the accusation devastated me.
I recalled seeing a documentary on public television about what amounted to witch hunts to convict innocent child-care workers of child abuse, all based on the false memories of the children involved. Was Stephanie having similar false memories? Or had she, in fact, been abused while visiting Sally and me in Chesapeake? To be sure, we had so many large and loud parties in the sprawling farmhouse we rented out of town, she could have been abused by anyone and I wouldn’t have known a thing about it unless she told me. All I knew was that I had not abused her. I was not a pedophile.
Then I imagined what Helen and her ilk would conclude, hearing me deny this. Aha!, they would think. See there? You are in denial! Your very denial, in fact, proves your guilt!
This was the Catch-22 of the recovery industry, which I well knew from my experience in a treatment center for alcoholics. In my fifties, I’d spent almost a year in a VA program to get alcohol out of my life – and Hooker, in fact, had joined me, to demonstrate how much we lived on the same wavelength. We both had been dry for fifteen years now. But even in treatment, even as I had to admit my own past denial of having a drinking problem, I understood that here was a measure for truth that was greatly flawed because if an innocent man cannot protest without being judged guilty for the effort, then what recourse is left to him?
I dropped the letter onto the kitchen counter and picked up the phone. I dialed Hooker’s number.
“Hello?”
My first instinct was to share the letter with him. But how do you tell even your soul brother that your daughter thinks you are a pervert?
“Hey.”
“Make up your mind?”
“As a matter of fact, I have.” I was talking off the cuff, letting my gut reaction lead the way. “How about leaving Monday?”
“All right!”
“We’ll take our time.”
“This is great, Bear. I didn’t think you’d do it.”
Hooker was the only one who still called me Bear, no doubt because he’d come up with the nickname, a natural one for a big man with short legs and small hands. I told him I’d touch bases with him on Sunday and hung up.
I reread the letter many times through the day. I even went so far as to dial an information operator but my daughter’s phone number was unlisted. I felt like I had to talk to her. This was my motivation in deciding to drive across the country with Hooker. College Park wasn’t far from D.C.
By evening I couldn’t stand it any more. I went to the university library to find out what I could discover about repressed memory.
3: Repressed Memory
I love old libraries. I love their high ceilings and long alleys of shelves, their bad light and cavernous silences. A man can lose himself in a library, can leave the stress and pressures of the world outside to find private solace in the pages of a forgotten book found on a dusty shelf.
I knew what I was looking for. I went to a library computer and brought up the subject index. A few minutes later I was overwhelmed by an avalanche of titles like The Courage to Heal, Uncovering Incest, Reclaiming Our Lives, Sexual Healing, Michelle Remembers, Too Scared To Cry, Dancing With Daddy, on and on they came onto the computer screen, a long parade of memoirs, confessions and histories. Just the titles were moving, and for a moment, feeling something close to grief, I forgot that according to my daughter I was the perpetrator of comparable horror.
Then I saw a title that jumped out like a nudist at church. I scribbled down the book number and hurried into the stacks.
The book was called The Myth Of Repressed Memory: False Memories And Allegations Of Sexual Abuse. Its primary author, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, was considered one the country’s leading experts on how memory functioned. I grabbed the book off the shelf and took it to a table to read.
For the next hour I was mesmerized. The book was filled with case histories no less horrific than those suggested in other titles but here there was a difference: the accused pedophiles were innocent. The memories used as evidence to charge them and in some cases to initially convict them did not hold up.
Again I remembered the documentary I had seen on public television, about the day care workers, men and women alike, accused not only of sexual child abuse but of putting children through sadistic and satanic rituals, committing acts of unspeakable perversion on them. In the long run, they were proven innocent but their lives already were ruined. Where were they now? No doubt living anonymous lives as best they could.
As I read, I dog-eared pages to copy later.
Memory, according to Dr. Loftus, was a very complex and dynamic process. It was not a matter of remembering something static, the way one finds a lost coin in the grass. In one chapter she wrote:
I explained to the court that memory fades with time, losing detail and accuracy; as time goes by, the weakened memories are increasingly vulnerable to “post-event imagination” – facts, ideas, inferences, and opinions that become available to a witness after an event is completely over….Once these details were inserted into a person’s mind through the technique of exposure to post-event information, they were adopted as the truth and protected as fiercely as the “real,” original details. Subjects typically resisted any suggestion that their richly detailed memories might have been flawed or contaminated and asserted with great confidence that they saw what their revised and adapted memories told them they saw.
Later another statement caught my eye, and I dog-eared the page to copy it:
In a psychotherapeutically inspired double bind typical of our times, denial itself is evidence of denial, the pathological indicator that makes declarations of innocence virtual proof of guilt.
Here was the Catch-22 in a nutshell, which I’d become aware of during treatment.
I was getting bogged down, the book becoming repetitive as well as depressing, by the time a young woman told me the library was going to close in thirty minutes. I immediately hurried to a copy machine.
I was stepping down the library steps when I heard a voice behind me.
“Robert Bass?”
I turned and faced a woman, not quite my age, her hair turning gray, tall and slender, a nice-looking woman who was weathering the years quite well. She was grinning at me.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
She did look vaguely familiar but she was too old to be a former student.
“Mary Warner.”
“Mary!”
As soon as I acknowledged her, she raced forward, arms open for a hug, the smile broader than ever. We embraced and then she stepped back, studying me.
”I kept staring at you in the library. I was sure it was you.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Mary Warner had been a history professor when Sally and I were teaching in the English Department at Chesapeake College. That was thirty years ago. I remembered thinking I was deliriously happy then – until Sally dropped a bombshell one humid summer afternoon: she was sexually attracted to women.
“I’m retired, of course,” Mary said. “My daughter lives here. I live in Seattle and come down quite often. I heard you ended up in California.”
“Briefly, right after the divorce. But I got a teaching job here and stayed.”
“You’re not still teaching?”
“Oh, no. Retired five years now.”
We had blurted out the basics and stood grinning at one another. I’d always liked Mary.
“And Don?” I asked.
“He died almost ten years ago. I never remarried.”
There was something almost flirtatious about the way she added the latter. We’d done our share of flirting at faculty parties but never in a serious way. We just enjoyed one another’s company.
“Listen,” Mary said, “I have to pick up my daughter for a late dinner. I’d invite you but—”
“No, no,” I interrupted.
“I would like to spend time with you to catch up. Are you doing anything for brunch tomorrow?”
I wasn’t, of course, but hesitated because I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to go with the spontaneous joy I was feeling in our chance meeting. At any moment it might disintegrate into depression about my daughter, and I wanted to be alone when this happened. When Mary noticed my hesitation and looked disappointed by it, I quickly said, “Brunch would be great.”
We made a date for the Hilton Hotel downtown at ten, hugged a farewell, and walked off across campus in opposite directions.
Before calling it a night, I again tried the information operator. The second one gave me the same information as the first, Stephanie’s number was unlisted. I pictured myself walking up to her front door in College Park unannounced in several weeks, and the notion was terrifying.
Finally I dragged myself to bed. For a moment, before slipping into sleep, I regretted accepting a brunch date with Mary Warner.
4: Sunday Brunch
My daughter’s accusation was not easily dismissed. It didn’t help that the field of repressed memory was controversial, that distinguished scientists doubted its very legitimacy. Stephanie believed I was a pedophile. Was she hallucinating or did she have the wrong guy? How could I convince her I was innocent?
In this state of mind, I dragged myself to the Hilton. I am habitually early anywhere I go. Even with my reluctance to appear, I walked into the hotel restaurant ten minutes before ten. And Mary Warner was already there.
Her smile across the room lit up the gray morning outside and the poor “mood” lighting inside. She was sitting at a small table in the back corner, in a gray suit, purple turtleneck sweater, and dangling silver earrings to match her graying hair, which had been pulled back last night but now was loose and falling to her shoulders. She was one of those women who looked better with age. At least I didn’t remember her being so beautiful thirty years ago.
I complimented her appearance, and she politely returned the favor, noticing that I had lost weight since the Chesapeake days. This was true but misleading. I still struggled to stay at 250, and this morning I felt underdressed in the slacks, shirt, tie and sports coat I had grabbed from the closet. I actually wasn’t underdressed in comparison to other men in the restaurant. I just felt so because Mary looked so damn good.
Sitting down, I resisted a sudden urge to tell her everything. What I wanted was understanding, and her smile and radiance suggested it was available. But I knew better. Pedophilia was not a topic for casual conversation over brunch with a woman I hadn’t seen in thirty years.
What was suitable for conversation was a summary of our professional careers and personal lives since the Chesapeake days. She seemed surprised that I hadn’t remarried. She also was surprised that she never read about me in the Sunday arts section of the New York Times.
“Your plays at Chesapeake were so good,” she told me. “I can’t understand why someone didn’t do them in New York.”
In the five years before my breakup with Sally, three of my plays had been produced at Chesapeake College. All had done well enough before what was, after all, a small and decidedly easy audience. My agent at the time tried hard to find a home for them in New York, warning me that stories about small town Oregon would be a hard sell in the Big Apple. Sam Shepard would own similar territory soon enough.
I shrugged and smiled, which was all the answer I could give her.
“Are you still writing?” she asked.
Although this was a question that always annoyed me, there was something in her tone that showed concern rather than polite inquiry. I confessed that I hadn’t written a play in almost ten years. I was mainly writing short fiction now but precious little of that. I thought I had a novel in me but hadn’t started it. Then I told her the story of my Retrospective.
After I accepted the job at Portland State University and got my artistic bearings in Portland, I was offered a playwright-in-residence position at a small company called The Cubicle Theatre, which suggests how tiny it was. But I was in heaven. Over the next fifteen years, ten of my plays premiered there, several moving on to larger venues in Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles, but none to New York. I had no professional complaints at this stage of my life. Then, as theater companies are wont to do, The Cubicle went under, and I was without a theatrical home. A local director came to the rescue and dedicated his next season to my work, a retrospective called “Robert Bass’ Oregon,” a season of four revivals culminating in the world premier of a commissioned new play.
“That’s wonderful!” Mary said. Then I told her the rest of the story.
After the Retrospective, no one in Portland would touch my work. It was as if the season dedicated to my plays had been a farewell, a funeral, and locally I was dead as a playwright. I continued to write, and occasionally my work was done out of state, in Chicago, in Minneapolis, in Dallas. Never in New York. I won a few contests, the kind that may look good on a resume but had no other practical consequences. But I no longer needed a resume since I was approaching retirement. I also didn’t need the royalties. Some years earlier I’d sold the film rights to a play of mine and wrote the screenplay myself. Although the script was never produced, this opened doors in Hollywood, and I found myself getting a lot of gigs rewriting other people’s scripts. The money they paid me to do this was sinful but there was little satisfaction in the work.
“I finally got tired of it all,” I explained to Mary. “The collaborative part of playwriting, which is essential, began to feel like the proverbial albatross. I still wanted to write, of course, but I wanted to write in a context that didn’t depend on producers and directors and actors, on other people. I actually began as a short story writer and a failed novelist before I turned to playwriting. So I decided to retire from the theater and write fiction instead.”
“How’s it been going?”
I loved her for the question. It was so much more sensitive than the automatic question, Have you published anything?
“I’ve published a handful of short stories. Did I already tell you that?”
“I’d love to read them some time.”
“When I get back, I’ll send a few to you if you like.”
“Where are you going?”
I told her about the cross-country trip with Hooker to see the Kerouac Scroll.
“It’s like a literary pilgrimage,” she said. “How exciting!”
A pilgrimage, indeed. In a sense, I was making the trip to defend my character, to defend my soul.
I said, “An adventure indeed.”
“And how’s your daughter?”
Her timing was uncanny. I hesitated, wondering what to say. I ended up lying.
“Doing real well. She’s in College Park. Excuse me, I’m going to find the men’s room.”
I took my time. I splashed cold water on my face. I took deep breaths. You can do this, I told myself.
As I sat back down, Mary reached to the floor and picked up her purse.
“This has been great,” she said, “but I have to run.” She brought out a business card, which she handed me across the white tablecloth. “I’ve always been a great fan of your work. I’d really like to read your stories.”
I took the card and said, “You’re very kind.”
“Don’t give me that. You’re a damn good writer. Why wouldn’t I be interested in what you write?”
If I were younger, I probably would have fallen in love with her on the spot for expressing such sentiments. It had been a long time, too long, since I’d been with a woman who cared about my work. I defined my very being by my work, as many writers and artists do, and an insurmountable barrier was raised in a relationship with a woman who did not respond to my writing. Usually, in such cases, sex held us together for as long as it could, after which we rapidly fled from one another. I’d had a few relationships like this in my life. But I hadn’t been intimate with a woman since retirement.
I managed to say, “Thank you.”
But Mary didn’t leave. We lingered and accepted refills of coffee, as if not wanting the morning to end. I had eaten too much, in part from nervousness, the act of eating being a substitute for talking – or put another way, it was less stressful and much more pleasant to listen to her talk – and in part because the long tables of food offered such a variety of irresistible selections. I felt very comfortable in Mary’s company, which was not frequently the case.
“Have you kept in contact with anyone in Chesapeake?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
Mary started to speak and stopped herself.
“What?”
“I’m not sure how to say this.”
I waited for her to try.
“After you left, the way you left, you weren’t very popular, needless to say. Then a year later, when Sally came out, things made more sense. You suddenly had a lot of people who cared about you and wondered how you were doing. For some reason, they often came to me to ask. I think some people thought we were lovers.”
I nodded, understanding how they might.
“I wish you’d kept in touch,” Mary said.
“Like you say, I wasn’t a very popular guy at the time.” I cleared my throat, a gesture to change the subject. “So tell me about Kidder. He stay at Chesapeake?”
Frank Kidder had been my best friend in the department. He, like everyone else, had taken Sally’s side in our breakup. No one knew she was a lesbian. Everyone assumed I was a philanderer. End of story.
Mary said, “Only for a few years. He went to Harvard.”
“Harvard! My.”
“It surprised the hell out of me.”
“How about Jim and Stacy?”
Jim and Stacy were older students who somehow ended up at most faculty parties, mascots of the English department.
Mary said, “Of course, if you didn’t stay in contact with anyone, you wouldn’t have heard.”
“Heard what?”
“They had a very, very ugly divorce.”
This was hard to believe. They had been the darlings of the department, with their young daughter, Carrie, Stacy’s by a previous marriage, and ambitions to go into teaching literature. Jim and Stacy were everyone’s favorite couple.
“It was the scandal that pushed yours out of memory,” Mary added.
“I thought they were as happy together as you could get.”
“Stacy accused Jim of molesting Carrie. The papers had a field day.”
I stopped listening after that. Mary must have wondered what the hell had happened to me; I’m sure my sudden distance showed. But the news was too much for me to handle, to make sense of. I could not believe Jim would molest Carrie, his cute four-year-old, any more than I could accept that my daughter would remember “an incident of sexual abuse” between us. It was as if the world, my world, was suddenly a very different kind of place, no longer serene and safe, but a place where unthinkable acts rose into view like demons in a nightmare. But here was a nightmare that might also be my salvation. If Jim had abused Carrie, might he also have abused Stephanie as well? The possibility, as hard as it was to understand, made my heart race.
“Robert?” I had no idea how long Mary had been trying to get my attention. “Are you all right?”
I realized I was sweating. I picked up the check.
“Let me get this.”
“No, Dutch treat.”
I ignored her and strode quickly to the cashier. By the time my credit card was being processed, Mary was beside me.
She moved close and took my hand. There was genuine concern in her expression.
“I’m okay,” I said.
Mary squeezed my hand.
Outside the hotel I said, “The news about Jim really got to me.”
“I understand.”
“What happened to him?”
“Actually it ended as suddenly as it started, and just as shocking. Charges were dropped, and Jim moved away. I heard he went to Oyster Island. There were rumors of a settlement. I don’t know.”
“But it was true?”
“A lot of people thought so.”
“And you?”
“I’m not sure what I think. It’s such a loaded subject, it’s hard to be rational about it.”
I nodded and looked away. A loaded subject indeed! There was a long, uncomfortable silence.
“Robert, I’m worried about you.”
“Really, I’m okay.”
“You have a big trip ahead of you. Will you send me a postcard?”
“If you like.”
“I very much would like.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Maybe when you get back, you can visit me in Seattle.” When I hesitated, she added, “I guess I’m being forward.”
“No, I’d like that very much.”
“Well, good. I had a very nice time this morning, Robert. I’d enjoy seeing you again.”
Suddenly, she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. We looked at one another a moment, and a part of me felt like kissing her back, a gentle kiss on the lips, but I stood frozen, doing nothing. I was still obsessing about Jim, who might be the proof of my innocence.
Mary touched the part of my cheek where her lips had been.
“Send me a postcard,” she said.
I let her walk off alone. While we were in the hotel, a dazzling summer sun had reached high noon but my interior weather was gray. Mary’s good company had been only a temporary diversion from what was on my mind.
I drove home, entered the house and went immediately to the bedroom. I drew the blinds against the warm sunshine, casting the room into a gray shadow that suited my mood. I stretched out on the bed.
Sometimes the gods are kind. They let me drift to sleep despite my over-active mind.
It was late afternoon by the time I woke up. It was time to pack for the cross-country journey.
5: Bon Voyage!
I was on my second cup of morning coffee when the phone rang. Since I’d been debating whether or not it was too early to call Hooker, I guessed it would be him. I was right.
“You packed?” he asked.
“I packed last night. You?”
“Ready to go.”
I glanced at the kitchen clock. It was almost seven.
“If we leave too early,” I said, “I’ll have to quit too early. I can’t ride more than five or six hours any more.”
“I can relieve you driving.”
“I’m not talking about driving. Just sitting in the car. My back’s not what it used to be.”
“So what are you thinking? Nine to three, something like that?”
“That sounds good. I’d like to make three hundred miles a day.”
“Works for me.”
“So we could have breakfast first,” I suggested.
“Maybe out of town, so we feel like we left. How about that truck stop in Troutdale?”
The cafe at The Columbia Truck Stop was a local legend, with slabs of chicken fried steak so large they hung over the large dinner plates.
“Now you’re talking. I’ll be by in about forty-five minutes.”
I was traveling light with two small suitcases. Tucked into the pocket of one was Stephanie’s letter, which I still intended to show Hooker. But the time had to be right.
Hooker, it turned out, had stuffed his clothes into an Army duffel bag. I didn’t know he still had one. Dragging it to the car, he looked smaller than the five-four he always claimed to be. I’d seen his curly red hair turn white over the years but he had kept most of it, which is more than I could say for myself. His face was a patchwork of deep lines and shadows, making him look older than he was. But this had been true about him since the day we met when he was a young soldier in his twenties who looked forty, a visual trick helped considerably by crooked, bad teeth, an old man’s teeth, animal teeth. They looked like hell but apparently never bothered him because Hooker kept them the way they were, like a badge of rebellion.
At the truck stop I ordered an omelet instead of the legendary special because I knew what the latter could do to my digestive track, harmless enough a disorder if one could go home for a nap. I had three hundred miles to drive. Hooker was more reckless and ordered the chicken fried steak.
We had done precious little concrete planning for the trip, which was our way. We both liked to act first and think later. We had a bit of time on our hands before continuing east on the Interstate, officially beginning our adventure.
I took out my wallet and handed Hooker five twenties.
“What’s this for?”
“Spending money.”
I had assumed from the beginning that most of our expenses were mine. A gift from Hollywood.
“Why do I need spending money?”
“Just put it in your pocket.”
He did.
I said, “A couple of ground rules. We get one motel room, two beds.”
Hooker grinned and said, “You really know how to hurt a guy.”
“Number two. No side trips on the way. We’ll do all that on the way back.”
“We’re going to Calumet.”
“Right. Number three.” I hesitated. “I should have written them down.”
“You’ve been losing sleep over our ground rules?”
“I was thinking about them this morning, asshole. We stick to the Interstates and go as direct a route as possible. Like I say, we can take our time on the way back.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
There was a pause.
Hooker asked, “Can I smoke in the car?”
I’d quit over a decade ago but Hooker still smoked, though not as much as he used to.
“No. We’ll take smoking breaks. I’ll stretch, and you’ll puff.”
“Smoking rooms?”
“You can smoke outside. Red, I know what you’re like without a cigarette, but I have my own health to think of. Second-hand smoke is a killer.”
“Last I looked, you aren’t dead yet.”
Our itinerary, according to my road atlas, was roughly this: we’d travel most of the 2800-odd miles on only four Interstates, 84, 80, 76 and 70, which would connect Portland, Boise, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Lincoln, Des Moines, Iowa City, South Bend, Toledo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Washington D.C. On paper, the distance looked overwhelming. At the same time, Hooker’s idea of the trip was like an omen, a gift from the gods saying, Now’s your chance to prove your innocence. D.C. was practically on Stephanie’s doorstep. Maybe the fact that I had driven across the country to speak to her would open up her heart. And maybe not.
After breakfast we quickly picked up the Columbia River and headed into the most beautiful section of the Columbia Gorge. On our Oregon side, rimrock cliffs rose to dense forest. Across the river, rolling farmland, golden for the harvest, stretched across Washington.
When we had driven along the river for a while, Hooker suddenly yelled out, “It’s a big river!” and started laughing like hell. I grinned and nodded. The line was from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s version of Woody Guthrie’s “Talkin’ Columbia,” which was on a record I played endlessly through the 1960s. Ten miles later, just because I felt like it, I said, “It’s a big river! My, oh my.”
As we approached Hood River, I finally felt like we were really on our way. The realization, which should have brought the joy of adventure, was compromised by the stress of my real motive for traveling east. For a fleeting moment, I almost told Hooker about the letter, as I knew I must eventually. But when I turned to him, I found him leaning against the window, eyes closed, head unstable, on the verge of a nap. A few miles later he began to snore.
Oregon interstate highways are generous with rest stops, and we made use of every one of them. If one of us didn’t have to pee, then Hooker needed a smoke or I needed to stretch. We seldom drove two consecutive hours without stopping for something or other, which from the beginning gave the trip a more leisurely rhythm than supported by the secret festering in my gut, which felt more urgent the longer I kept it to myself. I finally decided to show Hooker the letter as we sipped coffee after our first dinner on the road.
We had stopped in a motel off the Interstate past La Grande, having driven longer than I would have preferred. A restaurant was next door. We ate early, just past five.
The letter was in my pocket. I’d taken it from the suitcase as soon as we checked in, doing so while Hooker was in the bathroom. At the time I didn’t know if I was ready to share it or not. But I wanted to be ready to.
“Read this,” I said, dropping the letter on the table in front of him.
Hooker unfolded the letter and started reading. When he was done, he shook his head.
“Helen put her up to this,” he said softly.
My first wife and Hooker never got along. From Helen’s point of view, Hooker was a bad influence, the guy who took me away from home to party, the guy who seemed more important in my life than she was, which was true.
But it never had occurred to me that Helen had anything to do with this.
“How do you figure that?”
“She wanted to get back at you for leaving her. What better way?”
I didn’t buy it but didn’t feel like arguing the matter or defending Helen.
I said, “It’s all so surreal.”
“Helen planted the idea in her head.”
I told Hooker what I had learned at the library, that the entire field of repressed memory was filled with controversy. Some experts doubted its very existence.
“See there,” said Hooker.
There was another possibility, of course. Jim could have abused Stephanie during one of our loud, sprawling parties. But this still made me responsible, not as a pedophile but as a terrible parent.
“What?” Hooker asked, seeing my mind working.
“What if something actually happened to her? I mean, we had some pretty wild parties. Anything could’ve happened in that huge house.”
Hooker shrugged and said, “Maybe.”
Sally and I had rented the four-bedroom Victorian farmhouse from a local doctor, which was located five miles out of town and surrounded by farmland, which was rotated with soybeans, field corn, melons and strawberries. Our faculty parties were large, loud and long-lasting, and in the huge house any number of things could occur out of the sight and sound of the party nucleus. Once, in fact, a member of the English Department had passed out in an upstairs back room off my study, and it was the next afternoon before he recovered enough to wander downstairs, much to our surprise, disheveled and hungover. We’d given Stephanie the guest bedroom, which was upstairs in the very back of the house, far from the party activity downstairs. Anyone could have visited her there and had considerable privacy. Jim, for example, who had been accused of molesting his step-daughter. What if he were guilty? Then he was a pedophile – and he had been in my house dozens of times, including when Stephanie was there.
I said, “I had lunch yesterday with an old friend from Chesapeake College. She taught in the history department.”
“A romantic lunch?”
“A friendly lunch. Actually she lives in Seattle now. Anyway, she told me that Jim, a mutual friend, had been accused of molesting his daughter. The point is, if it’s true, maybe he did something at one of our parties. God knows we had enough of them. In a house that large, who the hell knows what went on?”
“Maybe,” he said again.
He returned the letter. I folded it and stuck it in my shirt pocket, next to my heart.
“So your daughter lives in College Park?” Hooker said.
I nodded.
“And this is why you suddenly decided to make the trip, right? You plan to see her?”
“What would you do?”
“The same thing, brother. I’d have to tell her I’m innocent to her face.”
“I don’t think she’ll talk to me.”
“She doesn’t have to talk. She has to listen.”
“She might not even let me in the house.”
“How long’s it take to say I didn’t do it?”
“Then you think I’m doing the right thing?”
“It’s not a matter of right or wrong. It’s necessary.”
I nodded.
“This is an affront to your character,” Hooker said. “The ultimate affront. Helen gave her a very distorted view of who you are, in my opinion, and you may not be able to change her mind, probably can’t, but you can give her something to think about. You drove across the goddamn country to look her in the eye and tell her you didn’t molest her.”
Without either of us noticing, the waitress had arrived with a coffee pot. She was a large woman with an outgoing manner and easy smile. She stood at the end of the table now, looking very interested in our conversation.
“Maybe you have an idea,” Hooker said, looking up at her.
“Pardon me?”
“We’re working on a movie plot. A man is falsely accused by his daughter of sexual abuse. We’re wondering if he should confront her or not.”
“You write for the movies?”
“He does,” said Hooker. “I’m just an idea man.”
“Wow. Did you write anything I might have seen?”
“You see Rain Man?” Hooker asked.
“I loved that movie!”
Hooker gestured my way. I glared at him, then smiled at the waitress.
“I should get your autograph,” said the waitress.
Hooker quickly took out a napkin from the dispenser and dropped it in front of me.
“Would you?” the waitress asked, taking out her pen.
I scribbled a name on the napkin. It wasn’t my own. It was Red Hooker.
The waitress retrieved the napkin and broke into her signature grin. Then she hurried away to show the cashier.
“Harmless fun,” Hooker said before I could ask what the hell that was about. “And I saved your ass if you think about it. You want her to think you’re a pervert?”
“Why am I laughing if I feel like shit?”
“Because it’s the nature of things, Bear. It’s the nature of things.”
6: Are we there yet?
I knew that such a long road trip would include spells of boredom, especially since we were trying to get to our destination as directly and quickly as weak bladders, bad backs, and nicotine fits permitted. We were allowing no time for side trips and spontaneous visits to museums or historical landmarks. We’d take care of all that on the return trip. But I did not expect boredom to arrive as early as our second day on the road. It hit us both almost at once.
“Jesus!” Hooker yelled without preface. “Are we there yet?”
We were back on the Interstate after breakfast, which had turned from the river to head south through the Blue Mountains and toward the Wallowas and Idaho beyond. A country music radio station played in the background.
“Enjoying the trip so far?” I asked, grinning.
“How many days did you say this would take?”
“I don’t know. A week and a half.”
“Three thousand miles, right?”
“A bit less.”
“Five hundred miles a day is six days.”
“I don’t think we can do that much. That’s over eight hours a day.”
“Drive faster.”
“Try a little patience.”
Hooker squirmed, then turned up the radio. Some country song I didn’t recognize was playing. Merle Haggard was the last country singer whose songs I enjoyed. In the distance, the Wallowa mountains reminded me of a summer long ago when I’d rented a cabin on the lake and written a screenplay on assignment in two weeks. The little town of Joseph had been a frequent escape for me in those days, a place to work without interruption or temptation. The last time I’d visited, a decade ago, Joseph already had turned into a touristy, artsy façade.
I turned down the music during a commercial.
“What we need,” I said, “is a strategy for passing the time.”
“A strategy? My, oh my.”
“An activity. Something to pass the time, asshole.”
“What, you want me to sing or something?”
“Please spare me.”
Hooker smiled. He knew he was the worst singer in the western world. He loved music, especially jazz and blues, but his attempt at singing was something like chalk screeching across a blackboard. Or what used to be called a blackboard. They were green now, or white requiring erasable markers.
After a silence I said, “I need a distraction. I’m going crazy here. I can’t believe what Stephanie thinks about me.”
“I can’t believe it either, brother. Helen—“
He cut himself off. He’d already made his point.
We drove a while longer in silence.
I said, “We can rap.”
“Pardon me?”
“The sixties aren’t dead. We can rap.”
“You think the sixties aren’t dead?”
“They never died. They just got usurped by the mainstream.”
“Rap about what?”
“Well, we can pick a topic and rap about it. A different topic every day.”
Hooker thought a moment.
“Is this like The Canterbury Tales?”
I laughed.
“That’s an idea, too. Take turns telling stories. But this is more like Tuesdays With Morrie.”
“Heavy, heavy.”
“Not necessarily. We can rap about lighter things than the meaning of life.”
“Sex,” said Hooker.
“You want to start?”
“Too early in the morning to talk about sex.”
“I was always a morning man myself.”
“Notice you said was.”
I grinned.
“One point for your side.”
Hooker said, “So why don’t we each make a list of subjects we want to rap about? Then we take turns and pick a topic from our list.”
“Now you’re thinking.”
“You got anything to write with?”
“Not handy.”
“You’re a writer and don’t have a notebook handy?”
“Retired writer. Sort of. I got something in my suitcase.”
“I need something to write on.”
“We’ll stop at the next convenience market. We need gas soon anyway.”
This satisfied Hooker, and I turned the music back up.
A bit farther down the Interstate, we passed a hitchhiker standing at the end of an on-ramp. She was the first hitchhiker we’d seen and a sight to behold, a young woman with spiked pink hair dressed entirely in black. She had a backpack and a guitar case.
“Jesus Christ,” Hooker said as we zoomed past her. He turned around in his seat to look. “I think she’s wearing black lipstick. And nose rings.”
“A punk rocker.”
“Is that what you call them?”
“I think so.”
“You get students who look like that?”
“Not for a while. Actually she looks out of fashion.”
“So if you have a nose ring, and get a cold, can you sneeze bubbles?”
Hooker laughed like hell at this and lightly hit me on the arm. He was feeling good and cranked up the radio some more. The station was finally playing someone I recognized, an old song by Hank Snow about a blue velvet gown. For a moment, cruising down the Interstate with the music and the morning sunshine, I felt like I was on vacation and not on a personal pilgrimage to defend my soul.
In Oregon you can’t fill up your own gas tank. It spoils you. We had crossed into Idaho before stopping for gas and writing supplies for Hooker, and I was fumbling with the electronic pump, trying to get my credit card to register, while Hooker shopped in the convenience market. I’d barely started pumping gas by the time he returned.
“Gas pumps get more complicated every year,” I mumbled and headed for the john.
When I returned, Hooker was holding out my receipt for me. For some reason I saved the damn things in an envelope in the glove compartment, though I never looked at them again.
Back on the road, Hooker started writing in the tablet he’d bought.
“Okay, I’ve got my list,” he finally said. “You want me to drive so you can make yours?”
“What’s your list?”
“I’m not telling. You have to come up with your own ideas.”
“I’m not going to steal your ideas. I mean, what’s to steal? I thought we were trying to decide what to rap about.”
“Right. I got my list of topics. You make yours. Pull over and I’ll drive.”
“I’ll tell you what to write down.”
“Why don’t you want me to drive?”
“Because you’re out of practice, and I’m more comfortable driving myself.”
“Asshole.”
“Topics to discuss,” I said, thinking aloud.
“Now I’m your goddamn secretary.”
There was a long silence.
Hooker said, “A college professor can’t even think of anything to talk about.”
“Okay, okay. In no particular order. Sex, I’m sure you’ve got that one. Women, love, lust-”
“Slow down.”
I smiled. Hooker was actually writing this shit down.
“Sports, history, the good old days, music, literature, politics, religion.”
“Wait a minute,” Hooker said, scribbling away. In a moment he said, “Okay.”
“That should be enough to get us started. So when do we begin?”
“No time like the present. You’re first.”
“Why am I first?”
“Because you’re the college professor.”
“Retired college professor.”
“Once a professor, always a professor. You have more familiarity with the Socratic method.”
“Listen to the man.”
“Better to lead a discussion. Better to pass the time on this boring Interstate. Why aren’t we taking the scenic route there and the Interstates back?”
“Because we want to get there sooner rather than later.”
“So you can look up your daughter.”
I shot him a look that must have revealed how quickly my mood could change.
Hooker said, “I know how you feel. I really do. Let’s talk about something else. Let’s rap. You want me to start?”
“I’ll start.”
“What’s the topic?”
“I’ve forgotten them already.”
“Asshole.”
He read me back my list of topics.
“Sports,” I said. “Let’s rap about sports.”
7: Rap #1 – Sports, now & then
“Compared to the fifties,” I began, “sports suck. Especially professional sports. What’s the difference? Lack of team spirit. Lack of personal character and class. Today team sports are a game of inflated egos. Look at professional football. Some lineman sacks the quarterback. Big deal. That’s his job. That’s what he gets paid to do. So what does he do? He does a little dance and pounds his chest and struts around like he’s the best lineman of all time. What an asshole.”
“And how they carry on after scoring a touchdown!” Hooker put in.
“Exactly. All that showoff garbage. Can you imagine Huge McElhenny doing a dance after scoring a touchdown?”
“No way! Or Jim Brown, Alan Ameche, Joe Perry, Gayle Sayers.”
“It’s disgusting. And they’re all millionaires.”
“More millionaires are sitting on the bench,” said Hooker.
“You got that right.”
“You know what started it?”
“Expansion.”
“And free agency,” Hooker added. “No player is loyal to a team anymore.”