On the Road
A text message from my father. March 14, 2021.
My mother and I are sitting on the floor of our house and she is holding wine glasses.
Do you want these? she asks. It’s the middle of my senior year of high school. She's renting out our house in Long Island after years of running a business out of it, so we are cleaning stuff out of the basement and packing boxes for the apartment that I don’t have yet. I don’t have an apartment but now I have four sets of wine glasses, two sets of candlesticks, and a glass platter. I imagine myself in a walk-up with candles in the candlesticks, a glass of wine, food on the glass platter, and more friends than I’ve ever had before. I am happy because I see myself as a sad character in a Sally Rooney novel, an adult woman in the twenty-first century.
And then I feel strange because I realize I am the age that my parents were in all the stories they’ve told me so many times. I am the same age my parents were when they spent all night watching movies together in the Village, the same age my mother was when she protested in solidarity with César Chavez, just shy of the age my parents were when they spent all summer trailing the Grateful Dead around New York State. I am a little uncomfortable that I am that age because I feel so young and small, and part of me is jealous that I am not living my parent’s mid-century adolescence.
But maybe that is just because my parents were raised on G.I. Bills and a strong social safety net, while I am coming of age in the hellscape of late capitalism. Maybe I shouldn’t complain, because my father’s Intel stock options are paying for my college. Maybe I shouldn’t complain, but at the very least I am sad that my country does not have universal healthcare.
Realistically, I know that I don’t actually want to be my parents. I don’t want to be the socialists who did a lot of acid in college until they made some money in Lower Manhattan and voted for Reagan in 1984. They only mention that single Republican vote when it's couched in economic justifications and whispered over wine at dinner parties.
My mother tells me about all of her friends who died of AIDS and she cries and I cannot make sense of her, the woman who did not vote for Walter Mondale.
My father loves Bernie Sanders but then we are sitting in our neighborhood drinking coffee and he tells me that he can’t understand that the Rudy Giuliani on television now is the same Rudy Giuliani he voted for in 1993 and again in 1997.
And in their faces I see the past fifty years of white liberal hypocrisy, but I also see myself. I know that my mother is why I have an addictive personality and like Vonnegut and scoff at Kerouac. I know that my father is why I listen to the Grateful Dead on long drives and sometimes try to read Beat stories, even though I don’t like that I see myself in the female characters who are only plot devices.
I think that I am using all this cultural lingo because I am so abundantly aware of the fact that my parents are old, that my father had a draft card and knew people who shot up heroin in Juniper Valley Park after coming back from Vietnam and my mother was talking in class when John F. Kennedy was assassinated so she didn’t understand that the President had died.
And now I remember the nights I spent as a child, lying awake in bed, trying to figure out how old my parents will be when I’m an adult. I remember running down the stairs to figure out the math on a scrap of paper, subtracting 1957 from 2002 to find forty-five and adding forty-five to twenty and thirty and forty, realizing that when I’m forty-five my parents will be ninety and thinking about how I don’t know anyone who is ninety years old.
And then I think about how my parents were the ones who survived, even though they were surrounded by death. Their best friends died from AIDS and died from overdoses and died from cancer and died from suicide and died from eating disorders, but my parents are still alive. I laugh that my parents do not have any friends, but maybe that is because they are the friends that survived.
A week after my mother packs up the wine glasses, I’m walking with my father in the snow. We are talking about how I might go to college in a place where it doesn’t snow. I think that after I go to college you should drive across the country, I tell him. I know that when he was younger he read On the Road over and over and that he has a lifetime National Parks pass because he’s over 62. I also think that getting away would be good for him because he’s maintained a daily schedule of car rides, a 4 pm nap, and a 5 pm coffee for decades.
Oh, I’m already going to do that, he tells me.
Really? I ask. I’m surprised — my father, in his older age, loves routine.
Yeah, that’s why I’m looking at new cars all the time. I’m going to buy a new car and I’m not going to tell anyone — I’m just going to leave.
I smile. I decide not to tell him that earlier in the week, my mother told me that she’s going to force him to take a solo road trip if he doesn’t decide for himself.
A couple days later, my father and I are sitting in my living room. I have an idea for a story, he tells me. Except it’s not really a story, it’s something that I can do.
Do tell, I respond.
You know my old car? I’m not going to just get rid of it. I’m going to drive it across the country until it dies, like a farewell tour. I’ll drive it until it shuts down for good somewhere in the Southwest and I’ll leave it there and fly home.
I make a joke that he is fulfilling his teenage fantasy to undertake an On the Road-style journey, but he ignores me, even though I know that I am right.
He continues speaking. But the whole point of the story is that when I’m driving somewhere I’m going to realize that I’m not just killing the car, because the car can also kill me. It can shut down in the middle of an 75-mile-an-hour Western interstate and I can get hit by an eighteen-wheeler and never return.
I later use this conversation to show my mother that to understand my father, you need to analyze him as you would a book. Because at this moment it is not lost on me that my parents bought this car in August 2002, a month before I was born.
It is a week later and my mother and I are driving in that 18-year-old car and I am watching Long Island rush past me. I am thinking about how my psychiatrist told me that I intellectualize my feelings, that I write myself into novels with underlying meaning. At the same time I am thinking about how my mother incessantly complains about my father’s stoicism, the unemotional façade common among Irish-Catholic men of his age. I understand where she is coming from but I understand my father because I read him. I intellectualize him. I'm thinking about how my mother is raw and emotional but I don’t understand her at all. I know that she cries and yells and laughs and relishes in joy, but that is it. I know that she hates Kerouac even though she loved being on the road with my father, but that is it. I know that she no longer wants to drive across the country like he does.
I think about how the week before I mentioned to her that our relationship works because we don’t need any emotional vulnerability at all. I watched the light go out behind her eyes and I didn’t know what to do because I thought we were on the same page. For years I’ve been telling her that someday I will write about her but I don’t know where to start.
Months later, my father and I are sitting at the same coffee shop in my neighborhood and we’re talking about the road trip I’m going on this summer with my friends. We are talking about how hard it is to get a campsite at Yosemite and how we can’t fly back into JFK in the afternoon because the taxi ride back to Manhattan is an hour longer than usual. I am thinking about how my mother tells me that I have to text her every day when I’m out West while my father tells me what cooler to buy and how to gut a fish.
Are you jealous? I ask him. Definitely, he responds, and I can tell he’s sincere.
I tell him that when we’re driving I’m going to write, because he’s been telling me I should write more for a very long time. I’m going to write about every Western town and I’m going to talk to people in grocery stores and write essays about them. And I’ll send him the essays so he can read them. And then I start thinking about how I’m going to write essays when I’m on my gap year in Taiwan and I’m going to write in college in Europe and then my thoughts overwhelm me and I stop thinking.
Later that night, I look at the bookshelf next to my desk, which still has the copy of The Good Blonde & Other Stories that my dad unceremoniously left on my desk one day as an introduction to Kerouac. I read one page before I determined that it was not worth my time because the Good Blonde did not actually have any character traits, but it is still on my shelf. I look at the books next to it, thinking about how I’ve been taking more and more trips to my parents’ bookshelf, plucking off copies of my mother’s Didion and my father’s Wolfe. I know that they haven’t been read for decades and won’t be missed. And I’m not sure how to reconcile the part of myself that needs these books in my proximity with the part of myself that rolls my eyes at the fact that my parents’ bookshelf is so stuck in the past. But every so often I flip through the dog-eared paperback of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and finger the faded grocery list bookmark in my mother’s handwriting and wonder if I’ll finally read the book all the way through when I’m on the road.