Memphis

Dear Diary,

At 11pm, I decided to pack up and move to the next truck stop, which was in Memphis. I think I was delaying because I knew I’d have to about-face and drive a few hours out of my way, and in the opposite direction of my mother.

This ought to have felt OK, but at 11pm on Monday night, it really only felt bad. I mean, I had to do some gas-math on my phone and ignore some guilt feelings.

So then I am at a different truck stop in Memphis, and this one smells really bad because it is also a popular 24-hour Subway Sandwich dive. I am sitting in a booth, eyeing a blond guy over the top of my laptop screen. He is a little younger than I am, just a guess, and he is getting really into his sandwich.

Oh, uh-oh, here he comes.

“Can I ask you something?” he is asking.

“Mmm,” I say, looking at my laptop screen as if I am busy. I am sort of busy. I have my work in one window — my job-work, not whatever it is I’ve been crying over — but really I am typing over Facebook to my friend Chris, who lives in Brooklyn and is describing a type of sex machine called a “Fuckzilla.”

I now know that the Fuckzilla is a cross between several Hitachi Magic Wands and a Johnny 5 robot. And I have just told Chris that I can’t look at a picture of this in public, but he says this one is safe to ogle because it’s missing all its extensions, and so I am looking at this and trying to imagine what it is like with all the dildos on, when blondie appears.

“Are you a trucker?” he asks me.

I look away from Fuckzilla. I look back at Fuckzilla and close its tabbed window. I eye blondie.

“No,” I say. “I’m in a car.”

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Texas. Not… directly, though.”

“I just came from Texas!” he says. “Wichita Falls.” Yes, yes, we are literally those figurative ships passing in the night.

“Oh,” I say, investigating something else on my laptop screen. “Yeah, sure.”

He looks a little twitchy now. He is wearing a wifebeater — it’s too cold for that — and black fingernail polish, which is chipping. From driving a long distance over a protracted period, I can now guess that this is to keep the black dirt under the nails from showing.

“What are you doing in Memphis?” he wonders.

“I’m going to visit a friend,” I say. I am looking down at my own fingernails. The dirt under my nails looks strange and machine-made; there is a perfect thin curve of soot that outlines the place where the finger touches the nail. “My friend, ah, has a newborn, an infant, and she said we’d see each other tomorrow, so.”

“So you’re sleeping in your car?” he asks. I bow my head and nod. “Great, I’m sleeping in my truck, too,” he says.

He is turning away. Where is he going? Oh, his sandwich. He comes back with it. He is already scooting into the booth.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” he asks in the split-second before his butt has found a permanent spot.

“Go ahead,” I said, “but I’m working.”

“What is it you do?” He eats a chip.

He doesn’t seem offended that I am so aloof. I automatically like that a lot about him.

This is not a work trip; I just want to drive. But I’m used to driving this route and always speeding, and now I want to pace myself so that it’s slower. But I think I’ve been going too fast anyway, I’m getting home too fast. So I made a small detour. And, OK. This is what I have discovered: every Love’s, and almost every truck stop, has wireless Internet. You can get nonstop wireless access at every Love’s for under five bucks a day. And if you’re driving around for 31 days? It’s under twenty. You can buy a whole 365-day subscription for like $145. That’s a lot less than Comcast. Why am I hiding at home all the time? I can write from anywhere I want.

He agrees that these are modern times.

“What do you drive?” I ask him. I am reading a celebrity gossip feed, looking for anything decent to slap up on the Internet at 6am.

He tells me it’s a box truck.

“Oh, sure, OK,” I say to him. I am not looking at him when I say this. “Uh. Yeah, OK, I know what you mean.”

He frowns. “Are you looking at one right now?” he asks me.

“Uh, yeah,” I tell him, suddenly embarrassed. Yes, I have just searched the Internet for photos of box trucks. He cranes himself all the way across the table, and I turn my laptop so he can see.

“OK,” he says, “maybe it’s more like this. I drive the longest type of box truck. Twenty-six feet. There! Stop! That’s my truck. Penske.”

I turn my laptop back toward me. “Twenty-six feet. Wow, this is intense. And it’s… apparently… the largest truck you can legally drive without a special license.”

He looks at me quizzically. I shrug. But then I tell him that this is a little bit uniquely terrible, that you don’t need a license to drive a 26-foot-long truck. I will start avoiding Penske trucks, thank you.

He explains that he works for a moving company. “You’ve never heard of us?” He shakes his head. “We’re national. We’re huge. Like Mayflower.”

“I have used Mayflower,” I agree.

“But we actually use Penske trucks,” he concludes.

“Ah,” I say.

“You aren’t married!” he announces to me.

I look at him. I look out the window. You have never seen me look so irritated, I swear to god.

“No.”

“Know how I know?”

Because if I were married, he would probably be here with me right now, is word-for-word what I almost tell him, and I have taken a breath, I’ve already formed the “be” in “because,” when the entire feeling that is supposed to go with the sentence catches up with my mouth.

“How.”

He waits.

My mouth works itself into a long, perfectly straight line.

He wiggles his left ring finger at me.

Right? Am I getting it?

Now he uses the index finger on his right hand to point at the ring finger wiggling on his left hand.

I stare at him.

He waits expectantly. I wait back.

He finally decides I have missed my window to answer.

“No ring!” he says, proud. “You always look for the ring!”

“Uh-huh.”

I have always wanted to visit my friend Dag in Tennessee, and I am not sure I’ve even been to Tennessee before, and Dag has this new baby, and every time I am in Arkansas, driving past the sign pointing just a little ways this-a-way to Memphis, I think, Oh. Someday I will have enough time on this trip that I will be able to detour and drive toward Memphis.

And this time, when I was sitting and wasting time in Arkansas, not doing the writing I wanted to do — because I had already stopped somewhere else in Arkansas to write, and it resulted in a whole lot of crying in public, which has temporarily turned me off the whole idea — I remembered Dag and checked a map.

She has also offered to let me shower there, which is nice. I’m gonna save somewhere between five and twelve bucks!

“You know,” he says, “if you buy diesel, you don’t have to pay for the showers.”

“I just read that!” I nod. “But I don’t buy diesel. But no, this is great, the gas is so much less expensive at the stops. I just need to pace my trip better, and plan so I get to the Love’ses so I can use their Internet. It’s great.” It’s foolproof, actually.

“That is an excellent plan.” He nods. He smiles. Now something is occurring to him. “Hey! You need a Fuel Finder!”

“A what?”

“A Fuel Finder.” Wow, he’s really excited about something now. “It’s a little book, like this,” and he holds his hands up to frame the size of the book in the air, “and it tells you every truck stop and where it is. But they’re kind of tough to find, ironically.”

I google it. “I found a 2011 Fuel Finder!” I tell him. “And! You’re! Right. It is out of stock.”

“I had to pull over at every truck stop to find mine,” he says. “It took forever. Wait! Wait right here! Let me run out to my truck. You’ll see.”

He is gone for maybe ten minutes, and then he is sliding into the booth again, wearing a red blanket. He holds up what looks like an almanac. It looks like an almanac inside, too, just the U.S. divided into 48 perfect states, and then a chart to show what exit you take to get to which truck stop.

This is something about knowing-how-to-drive that I used to be good at, and that I miss now. I used to use a map, and I’d watch for mile markers, and I knew to travel this many miles this way and then take this exit, and it was easy.

And the reason I first pulled over in Charleston, Missouri, is because I somehow knew that I was about to switch highways, and I knew this because I kept seeing the town’s name, “Sikeston,” written in my adoptive dad’s shaky pen handwriting, on a little white slip of paper, because he and I had been planning my drive from South Texas to Chicago for the first time, when I was 19.

And I was thinking about how my dad and I had always planned this trip, the way he’d searched the road atlas with his magnifying glass, and I was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with him, and we were counting miles. And then I was thinking, as I was leaving Charleston, Missouri, about my friend Lenny, about how in the wee hours of November 23 I picked him up at a bar and drove him to the diner like he asked. But when I was driving him back home I plugged in my GPS, and he was like, “Stop, stop using it, you don’t need it.”

And I said, Lenny, I do, I need to use the GPS, just tell me an address and we’ll go straight there, but I just need you tell me an actual address, instead of street intersections.

And he got really agitated and said, “I’ve driven with you before! You don’t need it! You already know where you’re going!” and went on and on about me using my GPS, which has a really loud, commanding lady-voice so I can hear her on the highway over the sound of my iPod.

And I finally got so panicked, and I get so sick of having this conversation with people who were my friends before I changed, and I shouted Just knock it off! Please just knock it off! I DO need the GPS, I’m different now, I’m not the person you knew back then, and something is fundamentally and neurologically different now, so that I never know where I am anymore!

And Lenny was silent, and I think he was rattled or angry, and then he gave me a street address, and I drove there, and he got out of the car wordlessly, and we didn’t speak at all until Wednesday night, when he sent me a text about the diner.

“Do you use a GPS?” my truck-driving friend is inexplicably asking me now. I nod.

“Good for you,” he says. “When I first started my job, I didn’t have one. I was lost all the time.”

I ask him, oh, hey, where are you going, anyway, and incredibly, he does not know yet.

“I’m waiting to hear from the dispatcher,” he tells me. “The dispatcher only tells the drivers where to go in any one day. We don’t actually know where we’re going until we get there.”

This seems like an alarming way to live.

We are both getting tired when we agree to meet again in the morning. “I’ll be in my truck over there,” he says, pointing out the window at one parking lot.”

“OK,” I nod at him. “I’ll be in my car way over there,” and I point in the opposite direction, somewhere by the illuminated Chester’s Chicken signpost.

“OK,” he says. He stands up. “If you get bored, I’m in the truck on the end. Penske. Just knock.”

“Ha, ha, OK,” I tell him.

We trade phone numbers in case. Mike! His name is Mike. I wish his name had been something like Darwin or Ted because I already know so many Mikes, and now I have one guy named ‘Mike’ and just-Mike in my phone.

It turns out my driver’s seat reclines until it is almost flat. I ball my coat under my head and wrap myself in a Snuggie. I wake up after an hour because I am shuddering, and I turn the engine on and fall asleep for a few minutes. I wake again and turn the engine back off.

At 5:30 it starts raining, and I open my eyes and see the little rivulets on the windshield. And I feel very close to everything because if I were in an apartment in a bed, I wouldn’t even know it was raining, or hear it, or see it.

In the morning there’s a voicemail, but I can’t bring myself to listen to it. Either my mother is actually dying, or else she has questions. Either she is always dying or there are questions. Good questions, I guess, like where am I, what am I doing, when am I coming home. I don’t have answers to those questions, mom, I’m just staying lost the way my ex-boyfriend wishes I would.

I have taken my grief on the road, and I hope the world will make my grief feel small, small, small in time, like a speck on a windshield.