Living the Dream

It’s been 25 years since the first trip, I remember watching him set the goal, save the money, say goodbye to loved ones and friends alike. He had a 1968 Datsun wagon, burnt orange in color with spray painted flames covering the hood and fenders. I never thought that car would make it far being it was 26 years old and had a million miles on it, but it had a soul forged out of an arduous life and perseverance, just like my friend. There was no stopping either one of them. He was around 20 at the time, living in his grandparent’s garage and going nowhere quick. He was on unemployment, getting laid off a construction crew and smoking as much weed as he could, all day and all night. He had a girlfriend, she had that girl next door thing about her, long blond hair and blue eyes, simply beautiful. She stood 5’9” tall and had she pursued a modeling career her face woulda been plastered on all then high fashioned magazine covers and all the billboards down Sunset Blvd.

I had been known James for years and it was now far beyond time for him to grow up. I had a special spot for him in my heart. He was not the smartest growing up, although his IQ touched 140. He was not the bravest, being picked on by friends and emotionally berated by his father since he was old enough to talk. He had this mental issue, dreams of suicide, a few feeble attempts, solemn and depressed from the age of 9 and just touching his 20’s. He was a loner for the most part, always with pen and paper writing out all the thoughts, all the feelings. 

We would have these talks of life and how it made no sense to him, how his feelings were so intense and hard to handle. I had no idea what he was going through I just knew it was heavy on his heart and he struggled to smile most days. He always talked about it, never understanding life and why things happened the way they did. Why people had hate in their hearts or were sick or poor, why happiness was such a mystery and fleeting. I never understood his sadness and always had great sympathy for him because of it.

Around that time he was given a book called “On The Road” by Jack Kerouac, he said that book changed his life. He couldn’t get enough of this writer, for a while there he had his nose buried deep in all the great beat generation books, Jack being his favorite of all. He found what he had been looking for and trying to understand and explain to anyone that would listen. In those writings he found someone that understood him and all the thoughts and feelings that flowed through him like wildflowers of lightening, he no longer felt so alone. He wanted to be Kerouac, to live that life, chasing highs and being with “it”. “It” being that unexplainable feeling, that intangible high, that precise moment when everything was everything that could ever be. To be touched by all the pains of the world, to be drunk with lonesome, sad and brokenhearted, to know empathy and altruism as if it was his birthright. He started to fall in love with life and getting high and drunk and writing and living. The suicidal thoughts left, the intoxicants came, the woman swooned, the partying breathed like a beast and killed like a lion.

He took that first trip, then another and another. I watched him hit highs and dig deep for lows, break hearts and hurt feelings, use drugs and woman and friends. I watched him decay over time, getting more and more lost as the years went on till there was nothing left of him. Just a shell of a man child living in his grandparent’s garage, stealing and selling whatever wasn’t nailed down to get high. His writings became incoherent, less about love and god and “it” and more about insanity, babblings of a guy who had been up for days on end, writing life to be different and dreaming of all the loves he lost. His girl next door, lifelong friends, self-worth, family, that true unfiltered happiness one only gets from a pure light in their soul. All of it slipping through his hands like sand, unable to hold anything close to him.

I didn’t think there was an out for James, jail was next and then off to prison. He collapsed his life within a few years of using and there was no end in sight. We stopped talking for a while, I couldn’t bear to see him in this state and the conversations were insane. He was of skin and bones, standing 6’ tall and weighing in at 140 on a good day. Skin pulled tight over his body like plastic wrap, detailing his bone structure.  Long greasy hair, unshaven, holes in his clothes and wounds on his hands from punching walls, cuts on his heart from living that life. By the grace of god he had found a bottom, moved away and got clean. I wasn’t sure that was ever going to happen. He sobered up and started a family, marrying a beautiful young woman who had thee most precious daughter one could ever imagine. They grew together, played house and live the fairytale. 

He had hit a pinacol in his life and the joy it carried filled all the lonely spots that were left behind from a life of hardship and pain. But still in him there lived the desire for adventure, for finding “it” as Jack phrased it. He would take solo trips now and again, off on his motorcycle or diving up to Oregon to see one of his oldest and closest friends. The road called to him and there was no denying its pull. As the years went on the relationship wilted and the marriage ended in a devastating fashion. Both left completely broken hearted and acting as children do in times of emotional pain and mental distress, in times of bitterness and resentment. He grew through it though, changed his ways and found a new happiness, one of which was made of him and not the external fillers we seek to mend us.

I think 6 or 8 years have now passed since the divorce and he seems to be centered for the most part. He now speaks of this lost feeling tho, not being sure of where it’s derived from. Is it being in the mid 40’s and not owning a home or having a wife, is it looking back and seeing there were countless years of surviving and not living? He’s uncertain as to why he feels so rudderless, just aimlessly floating through life now. In the end it doesn’t really matter why or how he says, it only matters as to what you’re doing to do about it. And doing something is what he is doing.

2 years back he bought a van and started converting it, that faint call of the road that never quieted down finally got loud enough for him to follow. It was a distant dream tho really, to build a van, save the money, shut down the business and travel around America. I mean really, who does that in their mid 40’s? I would tell him he’s crazy and he would laugh and say, “You don’t think I don’t know this!?” He’d spent countless hours researching and building, thousands of dollars in materials and equipment, all in the hopes that he would be able to walk through the fear of leaving all the security of the life he built to live a lifelong dream. 

He says he’s slated to leave come two months from now, in the dead of winter, to live in a tin can on wheels. He says its not really the ideal time to leave on such a journey but at some point you need to hold fast to faith and stay the course. From the outside it’s always looked like everything has always worked out in his favor and I guess pending the perception of the moment maybe it has. He would tell you “nothing has ever worked out; everything has always happened exactly how it was supposed to.” Needless to say, I’m his biggest fan and loudest cheerleader and I’m grateful to have known him. Godspeed and good luck my friend.