“Did you even shower today?”
“Uh. I think so.”
“When was the last time you ate anything?”
“Dunno.”
“I’m gonna heat up some chili. I’ll make you a bowl.”
“Thanks.”
***
This is no mid-life crisis. This is the end. In my fifty-fifth year, with our daughter finally in college, Estrella, my wife, gave up on our marriage and I gave up on life. It is about time. I’ve never been competent at any aspect of life. Work. Fatherhood. Relationships. You name it. I suck. My presence on this planet had to have been an accident. I should never have been born. It took me fifty-five years to find that truth.
But I don’t want to just snap my fingers and die. I want to have one last peek at some things I’ve been curious about. I have a bucket list. A very modest one. I don’t want to mess around. I just want things to be over.
But first I want to see Ithaca one last time and make music with some of my old bandmates. I want to climb an Adirondack mountain, any of them, it didn’t matter which one. And I want to drive north to Labrador to the end of the road.
Any life, no matter how botched, is still worth honoring with a last hurrah. And thus began my bucket run. A low budget, meager ambition stab at fulfilling some modest lifelong dreams. And that was what finally got the monster off my chest, got me off that sofa and out of my worried brother’s hair.
I lack the money and patience to follow my biggest dreams, like flying across the Pacific to see in person the Middle Earth-like landscapes of New Zealand. My poor man’s substitute for that, I suppose, is to drive north to Labrador as far as the roads will take me. I had always been intrigued by the proximity of this arboreal wilderness to New England. With three tanks of gas and a used Honda Element, it’s one wish I can afford to fulfill before I leave this earth.
Why Labrador and not Quebec? No reason, really. People speak English there. And I’ve always liked the way it rolls off the tongue. Lab-ra-dor, je t’adore.
Flying home from Europe on occasion I would catch glimpses of its exotic landscape miles below me. Myriad mirrored ponds and bogs, glinting beneath a lacework of greenery, set among the weathered bones of granite outcrops, gashed by what looked like giant claw marks. I had always wondered what it would be like to be down there at ground level, roaming around.
But first I would head to Ithaca, New York—a place that continued to possess my heart long after I had left it to live on both coasts and across two oceans. Those Ithaca years were the most tumultuous and vibrant of my life.
Funny, how so many of my peers who had left town before me had ended up back there. The place is a vortex for washed-up musicians. Look at me. I feel the pull myself.
***
Saturday morning. The cicadas are already stirring. The atmosphere hovers in that indecisive August funk somewhere between dankness and mugginess. The highway drones, a lawnmower growls in the distance.
My brother Eric sits on the patio with a mug of coffee, puzzling over his crossword. I load up my 2011 Honda Element with everything I have left worth owning, which doesn’t amount to much. I tell Eric outright that this is my last hurrah. He will not see me again. He pretends not to believe me. If anyone, he should know better. He’s seen my emotional tides at their lowest ebb. And before my recent rebound, my moods had been sinking as low as the prequel to a tsunami.
I say goodbye. He waves, but doesn’t even look up. I weave through Brighton, grab a toll ticket and accelerate onto the Mass Turnpike heading west. The radio is off. I hear only the drone of my wheels and the whistle of the wind. What music I perceive plays only inside my head. Old cover tunes my bands used to play. Tunes I wrote but never performed. Songs I never finished.
My phone chimes up and disturbs my meditations. Estrella. What could she possibly want? Our divorce is about as final as a divorce can get, the last significant trickle of paperwork sent back to the lawyers well over a month ago.
She’s all business. No small talk.
“I’m sending you a form. You need to sign it and return it to me ASAP.”
“What kind of form?”
“You’ll see when you get it. You’re still staying with your brother, right?”
“Not anymore.”
“You moved? I’m gonna need a forwarding address.”
“I … don’t have one. And I don’t ever expect to.”
“What do you mean? How will you get your mail?”
“I’m … traveling.”
“Okay. But when you get back, where are you staying?”
“I’m not coming back.”
“Huh?
“I quit my job.”
“Why would you do such a thing? You’re fifty-five, for Chrissakes. Not exactly … employable.”
“Don’t need a job. This is it. I’m done.”
“You’re retiring?”
I refuse to state the obvious. I just allow the elephant to float between us.
“Oh, stop with the drama.”
“No drama. I’m going on a bucket run.”
She sighs more from impatience and exasperation than empathy. “So where will you go?”
“North.”
“You mean, like … New Hampshire?”
“Labrador.”
“Labrador? Are you crazy? There’s nothing up there but gnats and swamps.”
“Nah. There’s more to it than that. I’m going north as far as I can get. Until the road runs out.”
She sighs again, a little less aggressively. “Well … it’s your life … now. Not for me to tell you what to do. Drive safe. Get in touch when you … uh … settle down. Maybe you’ll have a P.O. box or something.”
“Will do.” I let it stay at that. No need to extend the conversation telling her I never intend to settle again.
How long do I have left? Well, that all depends on the length of the road, and how long it takes to fulfill my intermediate goals.
And once I reach the end, how do I intend to end it all? That remains to be determined. Lots of options. Drowning. Hypothermia. Mauling by polar bears. That last one’s not high on my list. In a pinch I can always resort to Uncle Hank’s old .22, or the bottle of sedatives I snatched from his bedside. One way or another it would all sort itself out.
***
I drive past Albany, pull into a rest stop for lunch. My appetite has returned. I actually enjoy my burger and fries, and go back for a vanilla cone. I’m still fifteen pounds lighter than my peak, my waist size only a hair above what it was in college. My belt is cinched as tight as it can go. My jeans are baggy in the ass.
Back on the road, I soon reach old familiar territory. Endless pastures. Glacial valleys, rumpled and green.
The day before I left I had posted something pretty general on Facebook, that I was going to be in Ithaca, and if anyone wanted to set up a jam, I was game. Have bass will travel.
I don’t know what to expect, posting something out of the blue like that. I had ‘friended’ a lot of my old musician friends, but was never very active on Facebook. Half of the people I used to play with probably wouldn’t have read it by the time I blow into town. Whatever happens, happens.
I know there are at least five of my old band-mates from various bands bopping around Ithaca and its environs. I have been stalking them on the internet for years, gazing into their lives almost entirely as a voyeur, other than an occasional ‘like’ and rarely a comment, sharing little of my own life. Some of their posts are like a time capsule from the 1980s. It was like their brains have frozen. They all listen to and some even still perform the same kind of music they did back then.
Unlike them, my musical interests had diverged into things like Hermeto Pascoal and avant garde techno. Abandoned my roots? Perhaps. Evolved? Maybe. I was the same person inside that I was when I was twenty two. But I always had a taste for the new and different. Maybe it was a symptom of my attention deficit disorder. Maybe I expected too much from life.
When I leave Highway 81 and start down Route 13, I feel the knots begin to churn in my stomach. This is really happening.
I plan to check into some nice hotel, announce my presence and see who gets in touch and invites me over to jam. I have an amplifier and my old Fender Precision in the back of the Honda. I am game to play anything from punk to jazz. I hope to relive the charms of making music with these people. At the time it had felt like something close to necromancy.
If nothing happens, then so be it. I will move on to objective number two.
I have no hotel reservation, but money is no object. I have cashed out my IRAs and put most of that money along with half the proceeds of the divorce settlement into a trust fund for my daughter Maggie, to be accessed once she becomes twenty-one. I have about six thousand dollars stashed in my old Navy duffel bag. I figure that will be plenty to finance a decent departure from this world.
I check into the Hilton on the Commons, take advantage of the free Wi-Fi and post my arrival on Facebook. I sit there and watch the news feed, waiting for a response. An hour later, there’s still no action so I go out for a walk, and to grab a bite.
The Commons is much as I remember it—lots of new shops, but some of the old mainstays still remain. Like Mansour Jewelers, where I got great deal on the pearl necklace that was my gift to Estrella on our wedding day.
The place is swarming with college kids back for the start of the semester. They all look like babies to me. I remember being their age, crashing down the Commons, dodging and weaving around all the old, slow people wandering between storefronts like sluggish ghosts. Now I’m one of the slow ones. Deep inside, I’m still the same person, just a little more beaten down. Some things are clearer, others more confusing.
I order French onion soup from a place on Aurora Street. I check Facebook on my smartphone and notice a message from Sari. Lead vocalist from one of my first Ithaca bands. She’s delighted to hear from me and inviting me to stop by her place at seven for some tea. This evening. She’s given me her address. Turns out, she lives within walking distance, just up the hill towards Ithaca College.
I gulp down the rest of my soup and wonder if I should go back to the hotel room to fetch my bass. Maybe that’s a little too presumptuous. Sari only mentioned tea.
I still have an hour to kill. I stop by convenience store for a Purity chocolate ice cream sandwich. One bite sends me back like one of Proust’s madeleines.
It’s like I never left town. Of all the locales I’ve called home, I spent the smallest fraction of my life here. Only six years, but it made me what I am and became a watershed for everything that came to pass.
I can see why people come back. The place has a gravity-like presence with a reach that keeps souls in orbit no matter how far they stray in life. Eventually, it overcomes whatever force sent them away and brings them back for re-entry. It doesn’t matter that it’s not my hometown. The largest part of who I am resides here.
I’m almost thinking, screw Labrador. Maybe I stick around Ithaca and see what happens. Get some kind of subsistence level job. Landscaping or book-selling or something. I can try to rekindle some of the thrill I felt when I first came here after college.
Something unfamiliar thrums through my chest. Is it hope?
I stroll up the hill a little too early and find Sari’s house on a side street just off the main road. It’s a small place with a pocket yard. The kind of place the students usually rent. It doesn’t scream success. Sari at one point had gone off to Chicago with her boyfriend. She had asked me to join them, to start a band in the big city. She ended hanging out with some folks from a band called Ministry, even sang with them for a bit.
I’m nervous as I start up the walk. The shrubs are perfectly manicured. Rose bushes bracket the steps leading onto the porch. It feels weird, showing up like this. Now that I’m here, I get shy.
A car pulls into the driveway as I’m standing on the porch. I pause, thinking it might be Sari returning. A guy climbs out and retrieves a case of wine from the trunk. He spots me standing on the porch. Puts the case down. Straightens up, hands on hips.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah, uh. Does Sari live here?”
The guy is not smiling. “You Wayne? You that Wayne dude?”
“Wayne? No. I’m not Wayne.”
“Get your ass out of here. Leave her the fuck alone!”
“But uh. I’m not Wayne.”
He squeezes past me on to the porch, gets between me and the door. Shoves me off the steps.
“Go on! Get out of here.”
“Listen. She … uh … she … I used to play in her band.”
The door opens. Sari sticks her head out.
“Josh? What on earth are you doing?”
“This guy here ….”
“Josh, this is Torben. An old friend who’s visiting from out of town. I invited him over for tea. Sorry. I should have called you.”
So everything is cool after that. They welcome me inside, Josh all apologetic. Half-completed knitting projects are scattered about the living room. Josh tucks away the case of wine while Sari brews the tea.
“You like Rieslings?” Josh asks me.
“Um, sure,” I say, from the sofa. “If they’re not too sweet.”
“I work at Heron Hill. You know, the vineyard out by Watkins Glen? I just brought a case of last year’s reserve. It’s pretty special. Wins awards.”
“Great!”
Sari comes out of kitchen bearing a tray of tea and cookies.
“Sorry about your welcome. Josh is a bit over-protective of me some times.”
“Well, with Wayne out. Do you blame me? I don’t want him to hurt you again. You’ve been through enough.”
“Wayne?”
“My ex. He’s just out of prison. Josh has never actually met him, so … you understand.”
“Oh sure.”
Josh and I look at each other. He’s all smiles now.
Sari pulls out a photo album with old band pictures. A shy toddler appears, playing peek-a-boo from the kitchen.
“That’s my grandson, Henry. Isn’t he adorable?”
“Grandson?” There goes my illusion of feeling twenty years old again.
“Yeah. Isn’t that weird? Time flies.”
“So … uh … do you still sing?”
Sari smirks. “Only in the shower.”
“She’s pretty good, though,” says Josh.
“I know. Listen. I’m trying to get something together with some of the folks we used to play with. If I manage to set up a jam, would you … sing with us?”
She bursts out laughing, cackling like an old lady.
“Isn’t that cute! He wants to get the old band back together.”
Her laughing trails away, and her eyes get serious.
“Did you know that Nick passed away a few years back?”
“Nick? Really? How?”
Nick had been the rhythm guitarist in my first Ithaca band.
“Kidney disease. He had some … substance issues.”
“Oh. That’s horrible. But Joel’s still around, right?”
“Yeah. Him and Buster. They both live out near Cortland. Jay’s in Ithaca, but I rarely bump into him.”
“So … uh … would you? If we got together. Sing with us?”
She gives me this warm, sad smile.
“Torben, what’s wrong? Are you having a mid-life crisis? You need to let this go. Music is for the young.”
“I don’t believe that. Not one bit.”
“It’s so nice to see you, though. It’s a shame we never kept in touch. That’s what social networking is good for, though. Isn’t it? Getting people back together?”
When we’re done catching up with our lives, she takes our empty cups and packs the extra cookies for me to take back to the hotel. I say goodbye, and I’m torn apart that I will never get a chance to hear her sing. She was special, that one, with a voice that could take an ordinary garage band and e
levate it to another, more stellar plane.
***
Back at the hotel, I check Facebook again and find a message from Joel, our old drummer. I know for a fact now from Sari that at least three of my other old band mates are still living in or around town, but there is not a peep from anyone else.
Joel’s response cheers me. He says I should stop by his place for brunch tomorrow. He’ll see if he can get Buster to come over to jam. But I’m feeling funny about Sari’s response to my invitation. She treated me like I was the one who was stuck in the past. I could tell that she pitied me.
Conflicting emotions swirl through my head. Anticipation. Disappointment. Grief for Nick.
I settle in to sleep with a shred of that heavy feeling settling back into the bones it had briefly abandoned. My depression, full-blown, has the power to disable me for days on end. If it let it take hold of me, I might never leave this hotel room. The only thing that had gotten me off my brother’s couch was the conviction to make this bucket run the end of my days.
I come to realize how dangerous it was, coming back to Ithaca. The place truly is a vortex, drawing me from afar like an elephant’s graveyard. It threatens to entrap me for good.
So I have to keep moving. I writhe around the bed for a few hours more before packing up my things and checking out early. I go out before first light and drive by many of my old haunts, weaving back and forth across the streets of Ithaca. The roads are empty, populated only by memories and street sweepers.
I get back on Route 13 and soar up the broad arc of highway overlooking Cayuga Lake. I leave town as the sun rises. There are way too many ghosts to deal with here. This is too potent a place for a brain as diseased as mine.
I pass through the deeply scooped valley of Fall Creek to the model of small town decay that Cortland had become. So many factories come and gone. The place was just a shell of its former, admittedly modest glory. I kill some time napping in the shade of a roadside maple, before zipping over to Joel’s house on Central Avenue. It’s a small ranch house tucked between a church and a warehouse, with a mangy lawn infested with grubs.
I ring the doorbell. Joel answers. He’s quite a bit rounder, grayer and more creased in the face than I remember, but he’s otherwise the Joel I remember. So far, so good. He seems thrilled to see me. No significant other shows up ready to kick my ass.