Further

Vladi slept in the back as I pushed the van north. I thought about his attitude in the restaurant that morning and how cavalier he seemed then. He had not grown up as I had, and had not taken many, if any, serious beatings. His life had been more aristocratic, more privileged than mine and the cretins and miscreants were always kept out of the yard, so to speak. He was not the kind of kid that got a spanking when he acted up in class in elementary school, either. Not that I had, but I suddenly remembered a time in the sixth grade when I had gotten in trouble with two other kids in my class. One of the boys' father was Principal of the High School. The other's mother taught in our elementary school. In the end, I was made the scapegoat, the bad boy. I really had nothing to do with what happened, but my parents, apparently, were easier to deal with. Not that the school Principal pushed it much, for he knew that working class father's were not above punching a pencil neck like him in the nose if they were riled too much. Nothing really happened to any of us, but I felt the injustice of it all even then. I was a smart kid and the lesson had not been lost on me.

But that was the way Vladi had behaved in the restaurant that morning. I don't think he believed that any real trouble would touch him. I, however, knew better. It was early that morning and those hillbillies had just been having some fun and as long as we had gone along with it, there wasn't going to be any real trouble. Unless. There was always a wild card, and that was what Vladi didn't know. The Wild Card. Random Meanness. He was used to neurotics. I'd grown up with psychotics. All that had been needed that morning was one fellow willing to ratchet it up a notch, willing to make the real trouble. We'd been lucky.

It was afternoon when Vladi woke up. We were almost to D.C. I'd filled up once and now we needed gas again. We were both hungry and decided to stop in the Nation's Capital to have a look around.

But it was hot. It was the summer of the temperature inversion, a weird phenomenon in which hot air gets trapped by a layer of cooler air on top and can't disperse. Rather, the pollution of the city caused a greenhouse effect that drove the temperatures well above one hundred degrees. The air felt dirty, greasy. Toxic. We stood near the National Mall looking across the lawn. And suddenly, we had no interest.

"Let's get out of here," Vladi coughed. "This is awful. If we don't dick around here, we'll sleep in some cool mountain air tonight."

Just before sunset, I caught sight of the New York City skyline for the first time. The lights of the city were already twinkling in the early dusk. "There it is," I thought, my heart pumping hard enough to make me take deep breaths. It looked just like the shot in "Midnight Cowboy" when Joe Buck first sees it from the Greyhound Bus as he rides into town. We must be on the same highway, I thought. This is the very place.

"Turn on the radio," I said to Vladi. "Pick up a New York City station." Vladi snorted. I'd grown manic the way I did whenever we reached some objective correlative of my imagination. I'd been like this when we'd driven through Miami Beach on our way to the Keys, narrating every block, every street light, pounding the dashboard and rapping nonstop, a steady stream of stories and wonderment and desire. It all made him laugh.

"Man, look at that! You want to go?"

"Not now. Let's keep driving. I want to get to the Catskills at least."

And so I sat back and watched as the skyline went by. I was farther from home than I had ever been without my parents, I suddenly realized. That was New York, New York, the very one of movies and T.V. shows and photographs. I felt different, somehow, changed as if something was being added while something else was taken away. Washington D.C. The Big Apple. It was all possible. It was all true.