Off the Road - 30

a jazz novel on a typewriter

10

It is the remains of the day, and it is the downfall after a few short hours of peace. The blue Oldsmobile is quite groggy in the steering and could use a bit more horses under the hood but ‘tis enough ‘twill do. We used to cruise through Santa Cruz like a barge which probably was the commandment from the Design Bureau. This was a car that takes its cues from the lackadaisical blimp Mobile crossed with the 1950s station wagon in a box. In short, it’s perfect.  Perhaps to perfect but I didn’t allow that to grip my thoughts at least for a long.

Perfect that it blends into traffic by not blending in. Perfect in that anyone who looked at the car would assume that the driver was pushing 80 if not beyond. Perfect in that it thought of itself as a great gentleman but really was an old geezer with a sweater. I hoped that would be perfect for us.

Anyone who tells you that April is the cruelest of months has not been in California in September. While in the rest of the country, people look forward to the cooling down of the temperature the problem in California is not heat but humidity. We have too much of the first and none of the second.

The towns around here are tiny and barely visible if looked at live and on the map, they don’t exist at all. We speed along and a town pops up that neither of us neither Dean nor I know anything about. It calls itself Davenport, but it is really just a beach with hills and stubbly trees. The trees should have handed in their notice, but they haven’t for reasons that can’t be explained. The road is one laying in either direction or it is narrow. It is obvious that nobody visits this place but only drives through it to see the scenery and the telephone poles spiking up into the sea.

I looked at Dean and he was chain-smoking cigarettes as if they were going out of fashion, and perhaps they were. The era where everyone smoked or at least did not say that they didn’t is long since over and despairing back in the rear-view mirror one smoke at a time. Of course, I put out my right hand for another one. Then I pulled in the smoke as if there were nothing else to put my lips on.

“Dean, do we have a place to sleep, or should I find one?”

“To know what kind of place you can afford in San Francisco?”

“I don’t know what sort of place is available?”

“There are two ways to use the adjective ‘ the bomb’: one is stupendous, and the other one is anything but. You can assume that only the second type is available at short notice.”

I nodded because I had heard that from several people. The only place that anyone could get in San Francisco is in Oakland.

Once what we were doing would be chic and fine a place where the children of the beat could find them sold in a manner that reminisced of Kerouac but now all of the people from that age are gone and mostly forgotten except by a few who creak open a book and find typing rather than writing. But typing is exactly the point because one needs to experience the distant openness even if it is vapid at first glance until you realize that it is also open and free in a way that no city could be. I looked over at Dean and saw him taking in the communion of nature with a vibe that did not come from this century but from the last when towers and planes dominated the scenery like a wash through the air.

“Dean I think that you were born at the wrong time.”

“When should I have been born?”

“When a Dean went all over Los Angeles being a rebel without a clue and another Dean watched a robot come down to take charge of a small boy and another Dean came and made the people laugh.”

“All the usual places for young men to shine. You make it sound as if I should have been for to take in the 1950s.”

“That sounds about right.”

“I’m not sure that works for me because I think I would be lonely and listening to jazz and drinking cheap whisky to wash it down after playing pool all night.”

We laughed because otherwise, it would hurt too much. We drove and didn’t even check the time; it was three cigarettes long with a gasp of waiting because we did not want to seem too desperate. Suddenly there were buildings, not the kind that beckon the traveler but buildings for small ranges over the trees. I also noticed that there was one car that stood its distance but was almost looking, looking at us.

At first, I thought it might be a local looking at a tourist, because that is what I was, well if that. But then it didn’t seem like a local driving but someone who knew the wheel and could hug the curves re-lig-i-ous-ly. Which whispered into my head that this person was a professional and since there was no racetrack anywhere that I knew of, that meant the driver was some other kind of professional. And Dean noticed them to. So, we tried to be the last person through several lights and made turns through the outlets of San Francisco - Pacifica and into Ddaly City. But the car kept finding us and we knew that there was a suspicious pattern of being found.

Dean ruminated: “I wonder if they have enough supplies to make them lose us in the same way that they discovered us. But probably not. Anyone who is so professional would not want a blemish on their record. Even if it is a seaside town because there are no pleasant surprises in such places.