A man has to decide what direction his life is taking. There are signs for him everywhere.
Turn Signals
by Jay Seaborg
It seemed like I had been on this road forever. Maybe I had . I mean, it was at least a thousand years ago when I walked out on Brandi, slamming the door behind me and hearing the sound of crashing crockery from the other side. She had thrown the ceramic cat, the one I had given her on our first date together. I guess that made sense in a weird kind of way. What the hell, the whole relationship had sort of shattered.
There wasn’t any traffic, which didn’t surprise me. Who else would be going my way? If somebody had asked me where I was headed, my honest answer would be, “I don’t know. Wherever I end up.” But I probably would have just said I was going to Vegas. That always sounded cool to me, “I’m headed to Vegas.” It’s hard to get really lost in America. Hard for most people, not for me.
I put the car, and my mind, on cruise control and made myself comfortable. After awhile it seemed that the car was sitting still while the road was moving, flowing toward me at great speed, pausing for a split second, then rushing away, never to be seen again. I liked the idea. I could stay in one place and still get somewhere because it would all come to me. Perfect. I liked perfect, or at least the idea that the world could be perfect. If you don’t like something, wish for something perfect to come along and replace it. Bring a little magic into your life, you know? That was one of Brandi’s problems, no sense of magic.
“When are you going to do something with your life?” God, I could live ten thousand years and not miss hearing that again. I had enough memories of that phrase to last me through this lifetime at least. Brandi loved it. She said it almost every day toward the end. It could have been her own personal mantra. I just wish she could explain what she meant. I thought I was doing something with my life by living my life. What else are you going to do with it? It drives me crazy when I hear somebody talk about doing something with their life, as if it is a thing you can change. You can’t change. Nobody changes, not really. They just think they do because they look at things differently then they might have a few years before, but they haven’t changed. Down deep, they’re the same people they always were.
The road was smooth, like riding on a black carpet laid down just for me. Hey, a magic carpet, taking me to the next adventure. That’s what roads really were anyway. You could get on any road anywhere and if you stayed on it long enough, it could take you everywhere. All those miles and miles of endless highways, littered alleys, busy city streets, dusty country lanes, and dull suburban roads were the arteries that moved the human corpuscles of America from one place to another. We were all part of it, whether we wanted to be or not. Just moving and being moved, none of it under our control. Control was an illusion. Who could control even the tiniest part of their own life? Not me, that’s for sure. I couldn’t ever remember a time when anything turned out the way I thought it would.
You think you’re going along fine, then WHAM! Out of the blue, you see that you weren't in control after all. Even the good things in your life come without warning.
I met Brandi five years ago, by accident. Or by an accident, more accurately. I was just out of school and used to hang out at this little coffee shop near the center of Denver, reading the paper and writing songs for my band. One day a bike messenger had managed to wrap himself and his bike around the front end of a newspaper delivery truck. A street that had been deserted suddenly coughed up people like they were hiding under the pavement and a crowd stood on the curb, commenting on the biker’s resemblance to Brad Pitt. Brandi had shoved her way through and knelt down next to him, gently pushing her coat under his head to cradle it. That act alone was enough to make me notice her. Not many people would ruin a perfectly good coat like that.
Brandi wore her hair long back then and she impatiently pushed it out of the way as she leaned over to whisper softly to the groaning man. “It will be ok,” she promised. “Someone has called an ambulance and help will be here soon. Try to relax.” She acted as if he would take her advice, even with parts of his anatomy disgustingly visible. The blood didn’t seem to bother her at all and I wondered if she had been a nurse or something.
After the ambulance arrived, I went over and struck up a conversation. I complimented her on her actions and offered to buy her a cup of coffee. We started talking, and before I knew it, the sun was going down. It struck me later how weird that was. If the messenger had been a better rider, we would never have met. Brandi would have walked right by the cafe without ever noticing me and we would never have even known the other existed. That’s life for you though. One minute you’re just minding your own business and the next a beautiful girl just sort of falls into your lap.
That’s how we began. I always liked the beginnings of relationships. Infatuation is a heady sensation and we couldn’t get enough of each other. Brandi loved my songs, showing up at every gig we had. Even some of the rehearsals. She was in her philosophical stage at that time and she was drawn to the angst of my lyrics. She said she understood my pain, and loved the way I “verbalized the urban fury of America’s hidden underclass.” I was in love and wasn’t about to tell her I was just being a smart-ass. I mean, my father was a damn bank manager in Buffalo. But if she liked it, I wasn’t going to argue. It kept her around and she thought I was “deep”. Perfect.
There hadn’t been any change in the road for miles and miles, just one long straightaway stretching out to the horizon. No matter how long you drove on interstates in the west you never seemed to get anywhere and every place you passed through looked just like the place you left. You could get into a groove and just barrel along, not worrying about anything coming from the other direction, secure in the knowledge that it was just you, the car, the road, and the sky. Simple. Clean. No hassles.
I figured I was still somewhere in the middle of Arizona, but I wasn’t sure exactly where. I wasn’t paying too much attention to signs. I never did. I didn’t know where I was going, so for my purposes, one road was just as good as another.
Brandi and I moved in together, then a year later we decided to move to Seattle. I don’t remember why. I think she wanted to be near the water or something. Maybe she was going to work for one of those environmental groups. The day we left Denver, our truck got a flat two miles outside the city. We ran out of gas the next day and a week later somebody broke into our hotel room and stole three hundred dollars. If I hadn’t known better I would have said something was telling us to stay away from Seattle. I should have listened.
I saw a dot in the distance and as I got closer it turned out to be a hitchhiker, a girl weighted down with a backpack the size of Connecticut and moving with the speed of one of those old people you see using walkers in a nursing home. I don’t know what she was thinking, but at the rate she was going she wasn’t getting out of that desert this side of doomsday. I slowed down and leaned across to the passenger window.
“Want a lift?” I asked.
She was sort of pretty in a dirty, tired kind of way. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, tied with a red bandana. She wore shorts and hiking boots and everything was covered with a thin layer of yellowish dust. She took off her sunglasses and stared at me for so long I figured she didn’t speak any English and was trying to figure out what I had just said.
“A lift,” she said finally, speaking very slowly, “would be appreciated.”
I popped the trunk and we squeezed her pack in with my belongings. She slid into the passenger seat with a small sigh and smiled at me.
“Thanks. I was starting to get a little tired.”
“What are you doing out here, anyway? It must be ninety-five and you’re about a hundred miles from anything.”
“I’m hiking across the U.S.”
That couldn’t be right. Why would anyone do something like that? I said as much and she smiled again.
“That’s what makes it fun,” she insisted. “Everyone says I’m crazy.”
“Are you?” I asked. She smiled in a vacantly sunny way that seemed to answer my question for me. It was quiet for a few moments, then she began to talk. The air conditioner apparently revived her.
Her name was Eleanor Brown and she was a graduate of Arizona State University, which at least helped me figure out where I was. She was majoring in ethnic studies, specializing in Native American folklore. It had always been her intention to try to hike across the entire country to see if she could “find herself”. She was pretty loopy, but it was nice to have someone along after having the car to myself. She began talking like we were lifelong friends. She ended up telling me her life story, which I promptly forgot.
“Doesn’t this ruin your plan?” I finally asked to dam up the constant stream of conversation flooding the car. “You can’t hike across the U.S. if you accept a ride, can you?”
She cocked her head for a moment like a bird, then smiled. “I’ll change the plan then,” she said brightly. “I’ll hitchhike across the U.S. The whole thing wasn’t carved in stone anyway.”
That seemed like a pretty healthy attitude to me, even if Eleanor herself wasn’t wrapped too tightly. The second you tried to make something ironclad you killed it anyway. I could never get Brandi to understand that. She liked things spelled out, as if life was some sort of contractual obligation people had to each other.
“When are we getting married?” she had asked me last year.
“Why do you want to get married? What is marriage going to bring us that we don’t already have? We share our money, we live together, we spend all our time with each other. We even bought furniture. If that isn’t commitment, I don’t know what is.”
She hadn’t seen the humor. Once she got something in her head it was fruitless to try to change it. Somewhere along the line she had apparently gotten the idea that I had promised her marriage. I had no objections to being with her for the rest of my life, but I thought that two people should make that decision for themselves, without the added presence of the state. It was just a ceremony and a little piece of paper after all. You got licenses for things the government wanted to regulate, like hunting and fishing, not for marriage. Why bring them into it?
That was the beginning of the end, I think. We saw things differently. To Brandi, a relationship was something you carved out and once done, it was as solid and unchangeable as a statue. I thought it should be something that was flexible enough to keep changing, like a painting
where you constantly added colors and texture. She accused me of playing word games with her. Conversations began turning into arguments. Things had never quite been the same after that. Little things became big things and I think both of us could sense that we had taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line but we couldn’t quite find our way back to where we had been.
Eleanor was chattering on still, oblivious to the sounds of silence from my side of the car. I wondered how in the world she had ever survived out in the desert without anyone to talk to.
Maybe she had just been saving it up since she started and was getting it out of her system.
“Where are you headed?” she asked.
“No place in particular. You?”
She laughed. “This is a real coincidence. I’m going the same place.”
“You know, for someone who was planning on traveling across the U.S. it doesn’t seem like you have a real good plan. How are you going to do it if you don’t even have a clue about where you are going next?”
She waved her hands as if that concern was of no importance. “Things always work out. You can’t plan out every step in life or it’s no fun. Haven’t you ever just let yourself be carried along to see where you end up?”
That pretty much described my whole life right up to the present. Here I was driving through the desert with some stranger who knew even less about where she was headed than I did. Eleanor didn’t wait for an answer, but launched into another monolog. I mentally shielded myself from her verbal assault as best I could while I chewed over the irony that I could suddenly see what I must have been like to Brandi. Maybe she had more patience than I had given her credit for. Hell, Eleanor had only been in the car for a few hours and I was already entertaining fantasies of flipping her out the door while speeding down the highway.
Mercifully, I saw a town on the horizon and pushed the pedal to the floor. It was a place called Oasis and consisted of a dozen small businesses, a volunteer fire department, a town square and maybe a hundred houses. I pulled up in front of a grocery store, taking a moment to back into the parking space.
“Time for a rest stop,” I said.
“Good. My mouth was getting a little dry anyway,” she said. “I want to find a restroom and wash some of this dirt off too.”
“Good idea.” I got her pack out of the trunk and handed it to her.
We went into the store and she asked the clerk where the restrooms were. I waited until she was behind the door, then sprinted for the car and left Oasis behind me in a swirling cloud of dust. She would be fine, I told myself. She’d just chalk it up to another one of those crazy things that happened in life. After all, I had taken her from the desert and brought her to someplace safe. She wasn’t my responsibility after that. She just wasn’t. You can only be responsible for yourself, right?
Brandi had a pretty tough life before I met her, which might have had something to do with her hunger for some sort of permanent relationship. You wouldn’t know it from looking at her, but she had come from a home where both parents were losers. The father was abusive and the mother was an alcoholic and a drug user. She told me stories of how she had locked herself in the bedroom for hours, listening to the fights and blows as they duked it out in the living room. She had never had any real love or security.
That had spilled over into her relationships. She bounced from one man to another, looking for something she could hang onto. She thought she had found it with me. Then the problems had begun. She wanted permanent. I wanted flexible. She wanted marriage and security. I wanted to be free.
“Look at your parents,” I argued after the subject had become a regular topic of discussion for us.
“That’s my parents, not us. I don’t drink or use drugs and you’ve never raised your hand to me. We’re not my parents. Aren’t you happy with me?”
“Yes, of course I am. That’s why I’ve been with you for five years. I’ve moved with you wherever you wanted.” By this time we had moved to a settlement just outside Phoenix, where she was looking into working as an artist. “If I wasn’t happy I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
“I don’t know. You’re so hard to understand sometimes. We talk and talk but I don’t know if you’re really listening to me or not. You just seem to be off in your own little world sometimes and whenever things start to get hard, you run off to practice or something.”
She was stretching things out of proportion. I just thought that it was better to let things settle down instead of getting into a huge argument, so when we had one of our discussions I would let her cool down for a few hours, then go back home when the air had cleared. That wasn’t running away, that was just exercising good judgment.
It turned out I had been doing the right thing. She had prodded me over and over again to stay and talk things through when we had one of those disagreements, which had happened all too often as time went on. So I had and what happened? We ended up getting into a real argument this time, the one that had caused me to walk out. That’s what came from letting emotions control the situation.
I had gone back the next day and cleaned out my stuff, waiting until she was at work so we wouldn’t have a repeat performance. I was carrying everything I owned in the trunk of the car. As I had packed things away I realized that almost everything I had was old. I was still carrying around stuff that I had owned for years and years, stuff I didn’t really need anymore but took
with me because I couldn’t bear to get rid of it. It was like a part of me, even if it served no useful
purpose any longer.
As mad as I was, I missed Brandi. I knew I would miss her more and more as time went by. She had her hang-ups, true , but so did everyone else, including me. My own upbringing had been easier than hers, at least from the standpoint of not having to worry about being beaten or finding my mother passed out on the floor. My parents were pillars of the community, respected and solid citizens. The truth was, they were really like that. I don’t ever remember my father saying a nasty thing to me or anyone else in my life and my mother was involved in every social function in town. They had given me everything I could ever want.
Everything except for acceptance. They had this idea of how you should be and it was up to you to fit into that mold. I never could. I tried when I was younger, but it never felt right to be living somebody else’s life. As I grew older, I got even less willing to do things the way they wanted. I chose music over banking, a small liberal arts college over Ivy League, playing night clubs instead of working an internship in finance. They loved me through all of that, but never once stopped trying to make me change. Finally, I had to get as far away as I could and that’s when I headed west, ending up in Denver.
“You can’t run from your responsibilities, son,” I remember my dad telling me the day I packed the car and prepared to leave. “Someday soon you’ll find that you’re too old to be chasing dreams like this and you’ll want to settle down somewhere and start building a real life. I don’t understand the way you think. We gave you every opportunity and you want to throw it all away and be a musician? Well, it’s your life, but I think you’ll find it’s a mistake.”
They were pretty good at the guilt thing. But I had years of experience in letting such things go, and I hopped in the car and headed west without regrets. I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t just accept me the way I was. Why was everyone always trying to change me into something else? I liked the way I was. I didn’t want to change.
“Don’t run away, you bastard!” Brandi had yelled just after the ceramic cat lost all of its lives in a spectacular explosion against the door. “Come back here and talk to me!”
I had ignored her and kept going. We had tried and it hadn’t worked. It suddenly hit me that the best five years of my life were gone forever and I was in the middle of nowhere, driving as quickly as I could to nowhere in particular.
I pulled to the shoulder and got out of the car, leaning against the door and looking back the way I had come. Eleanor was likely coming out of the restroom about now, wondering where I had gone. Brandi was hundreds of miles behind her, probably thinking what a mistake she had made in hooking up with me in the first place. My family was thousands of miles away, undoubtedly thinking what a disappointment I had been to them.
It wasn’t hard to see the pattern. Running away was getting to be a habit. It felt like my life was one of those maps you see in malls, with a red cross saying YOU ARE HERE. All around me was wilderness, desert baked hard and dry by the sun and about as lifeless as the surface of the moon. Ahead of me was mile after mile of road, leading toward the unknown. Behind me was mile after mile of road, leading toward responsibility and commitment. The choices couldn’t have been more clear if they had been painted on the side of the mountains.
I needed to make a decision. I realized that I needed to decide which direction to take. That’s all; just pick a direction. It was my life. Did I want to change it or not? I stood there for a long time, thinking. I got back into the car and reached under the dashboard to pull the lever that opened the trunk.
I went to the rear of the car and began pulling things out, tossing them into the ditch along the side of the road until nothing was left except for my guitar. I put that in the back seat. Some things were worth hanging on to. The trunk was empty now, but it was a good empty, waiting to be filled with new things.
I wondered if it was true that you could never go home again. I hoped not. I wheeled the car around and headed back the way I had come, finally going in the right direction.
It's awfully addictive, that impulse to "hit the road and find someplace to start over". It takes courage - and humility - to dig one's feet in and realize that one's life is right here and now. This story gets to the heart of it with simplicity and grace - and a surprise turnaround worthy of its title.
Reviewed by LORI ZEA
4/5/2005
Very interesting story...Nice writing...I really enjoyed it. Your Cuz Lori
I met Jerome on a busy city street in Baltimore, Maryland, when he was forty-five years old. On that particular day, I was out and about, enjoying a much-needed day off from work.
I wanted to purchase a sukiyaki sub. I parked my car in an area of
