Oakland, October 2021
The open windows bring the ssssh of the freeway. I lay next to my almost six year old son, the windows flung up on a warm night in Oakland, as he falls asleep.
I drift back to sitting in the alcove in our house by the freeway on the south side of Potrero Hill in San Francisco and hearing the soothing sssh of the freeway. I’m supposed to be in bed, but I can’t sleep. I’m six years old and counting. Doing my nightly counting that grows bigger every day. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten. Keeping track of each ten count on my fingers til I hit a hundred, and then I say out the full number. One million seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand and two hundred.
I’m in my twenties in a cheap motel off a freeway somewhere in America, the sssh of the freeway and occasional bottoming out of a truck on a pothole. When I was nine I went to overnight summer camp for three weeks, knowing no one. When I was seventeen I went on a bus trip around the country for two weeks, knowing no one. When I was 22 I traveled around the world, knowing no one. Just before I turned 25 I landed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, to live for a year, knowing no one. When I was 28 I loaded up a van and headed around the country for three months. When I was 32 I left to India for two months. When I was 36 I drove back across the country for ten days. When I was 38 I drove back and forth across the border with Mexico for two weeks. Shortly before I turned 40 the world went into lockdown and I haven’t got on a plane or sat down in a restaurant or spent a night in a hotel alone by a freeway since.
My daughter Juniper is seven months and I realize I haven’t looked in her eyes as much as I did with my son Winston when he was that age. She’s more bashful, so after a few moments of eye-lock she looks away. Or maybe because she’s past that open vein of humanity stage. She has two front bottom teeth and her hair curls up on the top of her head like a Disney cartoon baby from the 1950s.
Winston tells me I’m the best Dada, and kisses me on the forehead. I tell him he’s the best son I could ever imagine and kiss him back and say thank you for giving me so much joy. I’ve already told him an Oliver and Peter story of Mromtown and Dogville and Bear Village and Hippo Hollow and Foxburg and Bunnyopolis and Wolfland and Colt City and Pelican Estuary and Aviary Island.
The crickets chirp and a motorcycle’s jagged throttle cuts through the air. We have had to turn inward. And that’s mostly been fine. I’ve learned to make things with wood, and fix things all over our house. We’ve added a shed, redone our garage. I’ve built stools and sandboxes and resurrected old work tables and fixed both our sinks. We live about as close to the freeway in Oakland as we did in my childhood home in San Francisco. The freeway was my lullaby to sleep, now it’s my passport to memories, or nostalgia, as I glide into my forty second Fall. “I’ve never been better,” and “what’s the point of it all” are simultaneous thoughts. I feel Winston’s hand twitch, the muscle spasm that assures me he is asleep. I think of joining him, but instead let my mind travel back to the motels by freeways I’ve stayed in.
That blissful night in the Sleep Inn in Southern Wisconsin after I’d spent three days on the South Side of Chicago with SeeKnow and Coco, when I arrived just in time for tip off of the Warriors NBA Finals game and ate sweet cereal, mind buzzing from the joy of South Side Chicago. I’d stopped in a ritzier hotel before I found the Sleep Inn and had my mind blown by the other worldliness of a corporate mixer in the lobby after having spent three days in the run-down apartments and rugged streets of West Englewood in Chicago. How do these two places exist in America at the same time? What would happen if they visited each other? Why doesn’t that happen?
That horrible hotel in Dodge City, Kansas with the bed so saggy I dragged in my camping mattress and slept on it instead. The whole town reeked of the cattle slaughterhouse and Brexit happened in the night and American cable news spooled out shock and bewilderment in the morning.
That tidy Days Inn near Mountain Home, Arkansas, where I’d finally pulled off the road after driving from Clarksdale, Mississippi where I’d reunited with Roy Banks. Roy had aged and gotten sick in the eight years since I met him at the Walmart one hot morning and ended up hanging out with him at his house most of the day. “Pain’ll make you change, boy,” he’d said with a toothy chuckle. He was on disability now, his body finally betrayed him after bending over the craps table at the Casino in Tunica for too many years. But we enjoyed each other’s company for several hours, as Best Knock Outs of MMA played on a large TV and he and his buddy Ulysses shared stories of their lives in Clarksdale.
The sketchy Days Inn a half hour outside Memphis I’d stayed in across from a Waffle House. Where as I went to retrieve my bag from my car a low-slung Chevy cruiser swung in and a white guy in a tank top with an air of desperation that he was trying hard to convert to menace, looked me in the eye and said, “Man we just drove all the way from Macon, my girl’s pregnant and hungry I need five dollars — we ain’t ate since morning.” He was out of a Harry Crewes story. And yet I wasn’t sure if he was parked behind a bush and swung out in his car every time a new guest checked into the motel.
The freeway that used to propel me to adventures now reminds me of them. A passport to the recesses of the mind, what we’ve had to settle for. Laying next to my son the way I fell asleep when I was his age, the low hum of gratitude ripples through my body.
