04-25-2014, 01:03 PM
So I quit my job, hopped in my car, drove to Ann Arbor to pick up Lucius, and we set off, headed for Shangri-La, in the guise of Eugene, Oregon.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe I did it. Why would I give up the beginnings of a decent career for such an insane venture? Granted, the BSP project was showing signs of trouble. Burroughs kept cutting our budget. With low morale and lower pay, programmers were leaving in a steady stream for Silicon Valley. When our manager was blamed for missed deadlines that were the company’s fault, he quit as well. His replacement turned out to be a pompous Napoleon type no one liked.
Still, that hardly begins to explain it. Clarion had been an inspiration, and Lucius was giving me further encouragement. Though several instructors at Clarion had issued warnings to the class not to quit our day jobs -- because writing as a profession takes time, and during that time you’ll need a source of income -- I didn’t want to believe it applied to me. I was overconfident, too full of myself.
There was one other aspect to my decision. Lucius, who lived in Ann Arbor, kept visiting Lady X in northern Indiana. On a recent visit he had clashed with the husband, tossing him onto the hood of a car. The threat of real physical violence was growing. Most people familiar with the situation felt Lucius needed a cooling off period, best accomplished by moving further away. A couple of Clarionites told me I’d be doing a good deed by taking him to Eugene.
Why didn’t Lucius just go it alone? For a world traveler, he was surprisingly needy. He would need a means of transportation in Eugene because he didn’t drive (when I asked why, he mimed steering a car, pointed aside and exclaimed, “Look! Corn!” then made a crashing sound). With his limited finances, he’d have to share an apartment, and felt very comfortable around me. After all, we had gotten along great at Clarion, and we both hoped this could be made a continuation of that workshop.
While I’d packed most of my belongings in the car, Lucius travelled light, bringing just a garbage bag stuffed with a few clothes, his guitar, and a large cow skull. Within minutes the passenger seat was wrecked. Big and awkward, he couldn’t find the lever to move the seat back, so he just forced it with a metal stripping noise. Even with it all the way back, he didn’t have enough leg room.
We dipped down into northern Indiana so he could have a secret rendezvous with Lady X to say goodbye, then off we went, taking a circuitous route, hitting Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon and other Indian ruins, Albuquerque, across Death Valley, up through the San Francisco Bay Area and ever northward. It was a crazy trip. Lucius was unstable beyond belief, depressed, furious, unpredictable in his moods. There were moments when he would think out loud, “What am I doing? What the fuck am I doing moving away from her?” At others, after long brooding silences, he would pound the dash and shout, “I’m going to kill that M-F! So help me, I’ll kill him!”
It would make for an interesting psychological experiment to take two people who are complete opposites and pack them into cramped quarters for a week to see what happens. That was us. Lucius smoked nonstop. What I liked on the radio he invariably hated. If I stopped at a vista point, he had no interest in it. He’d laugh at my naiveté time and again, when, in a restaurant, I ordered fish and got godawful fishsticks (“What did you expect? We’re in the middle of the fucking desert!”), or when, at a gas station in a dusty town in Arizona, I asked an itinerant for directions, and he blathered something useless and then begged five bucks off me (“That was great. You paid him more than you did for the gas!”). Lucius was a seasoned traveler. He knew all the traps and pitfalls; I was a sucker just waiting to happen.
Midway through our trip, he got it in his head we should forget about Eugene and instead turn south, driving all the way to South America. I persuaded him we should continue on to Eugene. It was my car, after all. And, to be honest, it was mostly my money.
Who knows what drugs he was taking along the way. At one point he started shouting, “No! No! Turn, turn, turn!” thinking I was headed for a concrete buttress at an underpass. But I was wide awake and going straight down the highway, and fortunately he didn’t grab the wheel.
No cross-country trip with a drug-addled psychotic genius would be complete without a stopover in Las Vegas. A Clarionite living there had kindly offered to put us up for a day or two with her family. She took us out to dinner at a club. The entertainment was a standup comic who told incredibly distasteful sexist jokes. Lucius began to laugh hysterically and threatened time and again to climb up on stage and punch the guy out. We tried to calm him. He’d ordered fish but wasn’t hungry, so midway through the act he ducked the whole fish under the table and smashed it upward. It stuck to the underside of the table, bringing on maniacal laughter. We dragged him out of there.
As our friend drove us down the Strip back to her place, Lucius pretended to shoot other drivers with his hand. Our friend ordered him to stop, because Vegas wasn’t the place for that, people were routinely found shot dead in vacant lots. Finally we said our goodbyes and left Vegas. Onward, sweeping upward, to Eugene, Oregon.
We lit on Kate and Damon’s doorstep late one evening. They had heard of our epic journey through the grapevine and welcomed us in. As they asked us about the trip, I settled on the living room floor. When it came time for us to retire to their spare bedroom, Kate and Damon watched me with some concern as it took me three tries to get up. I was totally exhausted.
It turned out that we had come at a very bad time. Kate was having a medical emergency. Not that they let on. Damon was gracious as ever, and while Kate vanished for a spell, he put us up until we found an apartment. Only after Kate had pulled through just fine did they tell us.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe I did it. Why would I give up the beginnings of a decent career for such an insane venture? Granted, the BSP project was showing signs of trouble. Burroughs kept cutting our budget. With low morale and lower pay, programmers were leaving in a steady stream for Silicon Valley. When our manager was blamed for missed deadlines that were the company’s fault, he quit as well. His replacement turned out to be a pompous Napoleon type no one liked.
Still, that hardly begins to explain it. Clarion had been an inspiration, and Lucius was giving me further encouragement. Though several instructors at Clarion had issued warnings to the class not to quit our day jobs -- because writing as a profession takes time, and during that time you’ll need a source of income -- I didn’t want to believe it applied to me. I was overconfident, too full of myself.
There was one other aspect to my decision. Lucius, who lived in Ann Arbor, kept visiting Lady X in northern Indiana. On a recent visit he had clashed with the husband, tossing him onto the hood of a car. The threat of real physical violence was growing. Most people familiar with the situation felt Lucius needed a cooling off period, best accomplished by moving further away. A couple of Clarionites told me I’d be doing a good deed by taking him to Eugene.
Why didn’t Lucius just go it alone? For a world traveler, he was surprisingly needy. He would need a means of transportation in Eugene because he didn’t drive (when I asked why, he mimed steering a car, pointed aside and exclaimed, “Look! Corn!” then made a crashing sound). With his limited finances, he’d have to share an apartment, and felt very comfortable around me. After all, we had gotten along great at Clarion, and we both hoped this could be made a continuation of that workshop.
While I’d packed most of my belongings in the car, Lucius travelled light, bringing just a garbage bag stuffed with a few clothes, his guitar, and a large cow skull. Within minutes the passenger seat was wrecked. Big and awkward, he couldn’t find the lever to move the seat back, so he just forced it with a metal stripping noise. Even with it all the way back, he didn’t have enough leg room.
We dipped down into northern Indiana so he could have a secret rendezvous with Lady X to say goodbye, then off we went, taking a circuitous route, hitting Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon and other Indian ruins, Albuquerque, across Death Valley, up through the San Francisco Bay Area and ever northward. It was a crazy trip. Lucius was unstable beyond belief, depressed, furious, unpredictable in his moods. There were moments when he would think out loud, “What am I doing? What the fuck am I doing moving away from her?” At others, after long brooding silences, he would pound the dash and shout, “I’m going to kill that M-F! So help me, I’ll kill him!”
It would make for an interesting psychological experiment to take two people who are complete opposites and pack them into cramped quarters for a week to see what happens. That was us. Lucius smoked nonstop. What I liked on the radio he invariably hated. If I stopped at a vista point, he had no interest in it. He’d laugh at my naiveté time and again, when, in a restaurant, I ordered fish and got godawful fishsticks (“What did you expect? We’re in the middle of the fucking desert!”), or when, at a gas station in a dusty town in Arizona, I asked an itinerant for directions, and he blathered something useless and then begged five bucks off me (“That was great. You paid him more than you did for the gas!”). Lucius was a seasoned traveler. He knew all the traps and pitfalls; I was a sucker just waiting to happen.
Midway through our trip, he got it in his head we should forget about Eugene and instead turn south, driving all the way to South America. I persuaded him we should continue on to Eugene. It was my car, after all. And, to be honest, it was mostly my money.
Who knows what drugs he was taking along the way. At one point he started shouting, “No! No! Turn, turn, turn!” thinking I was headed for a concrete buttress at an underpass. But I was wide awake and going straight down the highway, and fortunately he didn’t grab the wheel.
No cross-country trip with a drug-addled psychotic genius would be complete without a stopover in Las Vegas. A Clarionite living there had kindly offered to put us up for a day or two with her family. She took us out to dinner at a club. The entertainment was a standup comic who told incredibly distasteful sexist jokes. Lucius began to laugh hysterically and threatened time and again to climb up on stage and punch the guy out. We tried to calm him. He’d ordered fish but wasn’t hungry, so midway through the act he ducked the whole fish under the table and smashed it upward. It stuck to the underside of the table, bringing on maniacal laughter. We dragged him out of there.
As our friend drove us down the Strip back to her place, Lucius pretended to shoot other drivers with his hand. Our friend ordered him to stop, because Vegas wasn’t the place for that, people were routinely found shot dead in vacant lots. Finally we said our goodbyes and left Vegas. Onward, sweeping upward, to Eugene, Oregon.
We lit on Kate and Damon’s doorstep late one evening. They had heard of our epic journey through the grapevine and welcomed us in. As they asked us about the trip, I settled on the living room floor. When it came time for us to retire to their spare bedroom, Kate and Damon watched me with some concern as it took me three tries to get up. I was totally exhausted.
It turned out that we had come at a very bad time. Kate was having a medical emergency. Not that they let on. Damon was gracious as ever, and while Kate vanished for a spell, he put us up until we found an apartment. Only after Kate had pulled through just fine did they tell us.