Read an Excerpt
Another disrespectful slob came up to us and said he was the
stupidest, most demented, hypocritical, cowardly, mediocre, witless,
unimaginative, untalented, sneaky, manipulative, dishonest, neurotic,
most useless and despicable person on the planet.
That was too much, even for us. We couldn't believe that all of those
negative traits could be packed into one wretched human being. We wanted
to believe it, but we demanded proof.
"You can't possibly be that bad," we said. The guy stuck a thumb in his
mouth and looked hurt that we didn't believe him.
"Ha! I can be that bad," he said in a child-like voice that was eager
for approval. "A gnat has more brains than I do, a slobbering, drunken
bum more class, and most people consider the slimy maggot a more highly
evolved life form than I am."
"Naah!" Dave blurted out.
"It's true. I'm despicable. Mosquitoes won't bite me, cockroaches won't
crawl on my floors, even when I leave food out or them, and lepers shun
me!"
"That sounds horrible, just rotten and useless. What are you?" we
asked. "A connoisseur of fine wines?"
"No."
"A gossiper?"
"No."
"Someone who drinks non-alcoholic beer?"
"No."
"Vegetarian? Public school administrator? Someone who uses the word
'Bravo?'"
"No, no and nooooo!"
"What on earth are you? What could be that bad?"
"I'm a newspaper editor."
That seemed like proof enough for us."
Read a Sample Chapter
CHAPTER 1
It was to be the greatest trip and adventure ever in the history of ever. No doubt about it. My buddy Dave said so. It would top anything that Moses or Columbus, or the astronauts or the apostles or our buddy Frank, who once took a train to Wisconsin, ever did. Every instant of it would be crammed with excitement, danger and adventure. There would be no stopping, no slowing, no boredom, no standing still, no dullness. Every day would be a tree-bending, window-busting, basement-flooding thunderstorm and hurricane of the mind.
We'd meet every type of person ever born: Geniuses and fools, scoundrels and innocents, the highest of the high and the lowest of the low, those on opposite ends of the human spectrum--honest folk and politicians, earnest toilers and government workers, believers in God and members of organized religions, law-abiding citizens and cops, intelligent beings and college professors, worthwhile human beings and artists, true men and males who wear hats--alcoholics, bums, dope addicts, conmen, swindlers, pimps, whores, liars, cheats, killers, saints, oddballs and screwballs, deadbeats and upbeats; dull and normal people, sickos and wackos and airheads and brainiacs. We'd meet them all.
We'd save the good from the bad, the healthy from the sick and the wicked from the pious, and who knows, we'd probably kill a few people along the way. We'd go everywhere and see everything and do everything, and in the course of it would almost die, God knows how many times.
It would be the greatest adventure of all time. Of all time! And when it ended, if it ever did, we would be heroes. Mobs of people would ask us questions, the world would know our names and ourbuddies in the neighborhood would--finally--buy us a drink.
It was happening. Dave Nadolski and I were going to leave our grimy, drug-infested, oppressive, dead-end Chicago neighborhood and take a cross-country motorcycle trip!
I was going to travel!
The magic of those words and of the idea! Whew! Nothing had ever sent my head spinning so and me grasping for lungfuls of hot, humid, polluted city air. Nothing had ever sounded better to me; nothing so good or important or so loaded with the potential to transform me from the thin, shy, sullen brooder I was into the man that I knew I someday could be--rugged, handsome, sexy, self-reliant, funny, fearless and capable of doing carpentry.
Nothing held that potential like that trip; not even the offer of a lifetime job in a hot, dirty factory complete with a thirty-minute lunch break that my dad had made me, nor the thought of someday getting back together with Shirley Kozlowski, a skinny woman who disliked her dad and who dumped me because I couldn't dance, drank too much and had no idea what to do when it came to sex. How I had dreamed about winning her back from the older, more experienced man with large hands who had gained her confidence and affections. This trip was my chance to break away from the stifling boredom of my neighborhood and drug addict, thieving friends.
So many stagnant, lonely summer afternoons I had sat by myself against the brick wall of the snack shop on the street corner and watched gum and wax stains on the sidewalks remelt in the hot sun while neighborhood folks shuffled in and out of the businesses on the street--the grocery stores, the cleaners, the bakery, bowling alley and the taverns.
When those people went about their business, it seemed to me that even the stumbling drunks had something to do and somewhere to go. Everyone, I thought, had a destination or a goal in life; an important job or something meaningful to do or say. There was a dynamism out there and everyone had it but me.
Everywhere around me life was racing by and leaving me behind. Everything around me was water in a stream racing its way to a factory inlet pipe. I was a rock being passed up by dead fish, mud, empty beer cans and insects.
I longed for a life other than standing around the street corner with my buddies, watching them list, stare blankly at the ground and mumble about the quantity of drugs they had ingested, how high they were, what stellar and worthwhile human beings the people they bought their drugs from were, what strong beings they were for being able to gulp down booze with their dope and how they were looking forward to the peak of their highs when they would pass out and sleep on the sidewalk for hours.
I dreamed of a life where I could sleep at night, instead of having to lie awake listening for the sound of our street corner pals hammering at the lock that my brother and I had bolted to our basement door in an attempt to keep our stereo, bicycles, our dad's rusty tools and our ma's homemade wine from falling into the burglarizing hands of our buddies. I thought that somewhere, there was a life where the first thing people did in the morning when they woke up was to go to the bathroom, not race down to the basement to see whether their stuff had been stolen.
There was some diversion for me. I worked as a produce clerk at a grocery store in a different neighborhood. The job of putting vegetables on display for sale was fun. And working in a different neighborhood provided me a glimpse of a new, hopeful world, or so I thought, until the day a muscle-bound stock boy with huge ears wrapped his sausage-like fingers around my neck, lifted me off the floor, squeezed until I passed out, and then, when I came to, held a sharp knife to my face and threatened to cut off my ear because I had mistaken him for his older brother.
A piece of me realized that not all of the time spent in the neighborhood was wasted. I knew that all of life needed to be experienced and embraced. But sitting around the street corner throwing rocks and howling juvenile insults at a young retarded woman who pushed an empty baby buggy around the block wasn't exactly the way I wanted to go.
Trying to figure out which one of my buddies would be the next one to die of a drug overdose kept me occupied, I'll admit. But because many of them did die, the game became less challenging and less fun because there were fewer friends left to speculate about. And standing around the corner in the middle of the afternoon watching my friends vomit up huge chunks of undigested pizza cheese made me hope that there was more to life than that.
And the way to get out was to travel.
Travel!
My God. The idea was so incredible. The idea crashed around my head and set me to daydreaming and looking at pictures of distant places and daydreaming some more and planning trips. It took me away, always, so far away, from my steaming, sooty neighborhood; so far away from the monotonous, earth-shaking thuds from the half-block long metal stamping factories; the acidly, metallic smell from the solder factory; the nose-burning fumes from the electric motor factory; and a lonely existence that I considered one of the most miserable in history.
Travel!
It had been my idea of getting out of the neighborhood since a few years back when Dave returned to the neighborhood from a trip he had taken one summer on a Harley Davidson to California. He was one big, idiotic grin and an endless source of stories that gushed out of him like warm beer from a shaken can. They were wide-eyed wondrous tales of the close calls he had experienced; of the thousands of odd characters he had met, the friends he had made, the huge numbers of foes he had vanquished, the strange and wonderful worlds he had seen; of how everybody he met came to say how smart he was and how much better he was because he had the imagination and sense of reckless daring to have taken the ride.
There were stories of how for twenty-four hours straight on the highway he outraced a motorcycle gang, a mob of evil, motorcycle-riding assassins, who wanted to smash his bike into tiny pieces and bite his ears off because he had insulted them by doubting their boasts that they stunk worse than dead, decaying skunks.
We heard about the chase and about how Dave threw a first grade reading text at the killers and how he gained on them while they spent several hours trying to figure out what it said; how he siphoned gas from moving cars on the highway into his bike's gas tank because he didn't have time, what with the killers gaining on him, to stop at gas stations; how one motorist he got fuel from refused to let him pass until he had paid the state's sales tax on the four gallons he had bought; how when his bike was out of gas and sputtering to a stop and the murderous thugs were groping for his ears he popped open the gas tank, sat on top of it and farted into it and how his body gas propelled that bike and him like a rocket and out of the clutches of the villains; how when his bike and his body were finally out of gas he hopped off and started pushing the bike and how, because he was such a great athlete and former track star, he was actually able to go faster pushing the machine than he was when riding it; how he temporarily gave the assassins the slip by painting a long cardboard box white, putting it over his head and pretending that he was a giant bar of soap; and how, when the bikers finally cornered him in an abandoned barn, he drove them away in fear and humiliation when he made them believe that he was an evil but powerful sorcerer by shouting words at them from an unabridged dictionary.
Dave's nickname around the neighborhood was "Bullshit Nadolski." I knew that his stories were embellished, but I didn't care. I wanted to roam the open road, take orders from no one, go where I wanted and ride through the rain and sleet and snow. I ached to travel.
One day when Dave, seeing me depressed, suggested that I buy a motorcycle and that we take a long trip, the answer was immediate:
Yes!
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