Wide Awake
Out west, where Highway 287S narrowed from four lanes to two, in between the Rock Inn Cafe and the Texas Express Railroad, lay the Taj Mahal of all travelers’ oases, the Memphis, Texas Travelodge.
Memphis, Texas was ten hours from Christmas and another six before you reached grace. We had been to Colorado, all five of us in a three-seater car —bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a cargo plane but still not big enough for three grown kids, my husband and myself, a family’s worth of ski gear, Christmas gifts, shoes and boots, computers and devices, snacks, used Kleenexes; burps and farts, warped chapsticks, half drunk water bottles and knitting projects, and everybody’s foul tempers and anxieties and mumbled teenage responses and tired dad jokes. Lest I paint an unappealing tableau, we also carried a helluva lotta love. But with ten hours behind you, the smells of Otto’s Food Truck and the sounds of a couple pounds of pistachio shells rattling in the receptacle on the driver’s side door, it don’t matter how much you love me or I love you. Just get me the hell out of that car.
At a quarter ‘til melt-down, I started to cry. Nobody had asked me what I wanted to listen to on the radio. I’m a grown-ass woman, but Sweet Betty White, that’s what broke me. If they’d asked me, I probably would have answered, genuinely, Oh, I don’t mind, whatever y’all want. But they didn’t.
Big tears ran down my cheeks. My shoulders heaved and I sobbed over the sounds of the stupid podcast they’d chosen —something about Dungeons & Dragons, FFS—without asking me. My younger son patted my head and my older son patted my hand and I finally calmed down
Because I had seen THE TRAVELODGE.
We had planned to drive all night. My ugly cry swayed the vote in favor of Plan B: a sweet and blissful night’s sleep in Memphis, Texas, on the border between Desperate and Utterly Restored, which is the state I felt sure lay waiting for us behind the door of each individual, street-level room.
When we pulled in to The Travelodge, it was 40º. A chilly wind blew my hair around my mask-covered face as I waited outside the porte-cochère. An overcast sky probably obscured the moon, but I didn’t notice. I didn’t look up. I only stared at the buzzer and waited for someone to answer my midnight summons.
There came the kindest man I’d ever met. Okay, we hardly exchanged 20 words. I gave him legal tender and he gave me keys and that was the extent of it, but I felt like Mary and he the innkeeper who said yes.
Poor Mary. Don’t nobody know road-weary like she knew road-weary. Saddle sore, tiny extended bladder with a Lord and Savior’s big fat head pushing up against it lo those last few months. You know she had a few hemorrhoids the Bible failed to mention. When I took a hot shower in the teacup of a bathroom attached to Room 116, the initial pessimistic trickle from the spigot converted to a rainforest-worthy downpour of ample pressure and pressure-relieving thrums and streams, each one a miracle of modern-day plumbing. Under the coursing water, I periscoped my mind backwards. A hundred years ago I would have been spit-bathing in a bucket. 2000 years ago, Mary would have been lucky to get a warm reception, let alone a warm wash.
But enough periscoping through history (Herstory.) Here I was. Me, a far cry from a holy virgin. And it was not 2000 years ago. Not 100 years ago. It was 2021 plus 358 days. I wanted to be home in my own bed and put this whole damn year to bed too. I dried off with a bath-towel the size of a lap-napkin. No matter. To this pioneer, gratitude wasn’t contingent on the size and/or weave of the terry cloth. Nor did I subtract thankfulness points commensurate with how long it took me to fall asleep in that home-away-from-homey little room with its bizarre B-grade art and its mismatched furniture. The sounds of the trucks barreling down 287S, at first distractions, soon became lullabies. 6 am came quick.
Was I more than ready to leave behind my newfound happy place? Well, the strange smells of “breakfast” coming from the “lobby” helped put a little pep in my step, that’s all. We loaded the car under the single overhead bulb of an aureate crescent moon, eager to put some distance between us and the kind, continental innkeeper and his off-smelling morning samosas.
As we pulled out on the frontage road, I gauged the narrow median and the host of dreams separating those leaving Memphis from those yet to arrive. As miles accrued under the tires, the whole world took on a lavender dawnlight cast of new perspective. Purple clouds, underlined in capillary-pink and sable brown and gold-finger gold and red-eye red stretched across the Lone Star sky.
Hours later, we passed a red barn with “Sucker Rods and Titan Jumpbacks” painted on its tin roof in font large enough to view from an overhead crop-duster. Maybe its pilot would know what Sucker Rods and Titan Jumpbacks are. I did not.
Illegal fireworks? Farm machinery parts? CravMaga Cross Fit exercises? I’m not sure I want to find out or that I ever will.
We passed no less than four prison complexes and not a single yellow sign forbidding the offering of transportation to lonely looking roadside wanderers, wiggling their thumbs. We passed mile markers for Prairie Dog Town and the North Red River. We passed a lone semi, divorced from its hauler, parked in a field, its faded lettering reminding us to Pray for Peace.
On the satellite radio, Bono crooned,
If you twist and turn away,
if you tear yourself in two again
I could
Yes, I would
If I could, I would
fade away.
[Surrender.]
I’m wide awake. . .
Earlier that week, we’d all cozied in the ski condo one night to watch “Thelma and Louise.” At one point, a dirty, sunburned Thelma turns to an equally disheveled Louise and avers, “I’ve never been so awake.” Maybe she sensed the lieutenant closing in, the road fading away underneath her, all those miles between her and Darryl and Harlan clarifying that she’d been sleeping through her life up until now.
Oh, if only those girls could have found the welcoming arms of the Travelodge early on in their spree, maybe their ill-fated road trip would have ended differently. Thelma could have taken a relaxing dip in the pool in her ruffle top floral bikini. Louise could have maybe meditated, reunited with Jimmy and unpacked her past, breakfasted on samosas. Brad wouIdn’t have needed to steal the money because happiness is cheap in Memphis, TX.
Maybe I’m trying to draw parallels that aren’t there, like unmarked asphalt on a dark desert highway. The brain craves lines connecting its dots. A horizon needle-pierced with spires of 90-foot tall windmills pleases the eye. Their geometrical arrangement provides some cognitive assonance, the opposite of the static in the minds of our morning’s fellow doughnut shop patrons back in Childress, next town up from Memphis.
Though their hats didn’t say MAGA, when you know, you know.
Our delicious doughnuts were made and served by a lovely couple. I studied the woman’s hands when she took my payment. Her skin soft as rice water. Her smile sweet as blueberry doughnut glaze. Her nails, broken. Her spirit, though, seemed set free.
Those men at the table, benefactors of her goodness and her sweet baked blessings, wished us safe travels on our way. They could tell we were only passing through. In return, I wished them a Happy New Year. I kinda wanted to tell them to go get bent. I kinda prejudged them. I kinda wished their candidate would spent the better part of the new year in maximum security and that nobody, ever, would stop or even think about stopping to pick him up.
There they were, eating their doughnuts and lifting their cups of coffee, served to them by folks who came from elsewhere and got up with the sun to make those doughnuts and coffee, with their right hands, while with the left they pulled levers for politicians who would just as soon deport the doughnut shop owners and coffee makers as they would let the sun go down on their hard-working backs. Doughnut shop owners and coffee makers, innkeepers who answer the midnight buzzer, they’re the ones who made America great the first time.
Every mile the car advanced, part of me remained stuck back behind myself. I should have just left Childress in Childress, let those men forever be frozen in time, their cognitive dissonance playing on a do-loop in their caffeinated brains, gluing their poly-trans-fat asses to their chairs. I tried to shift my focus back to what I could see passing me by:
A squat plywood building, the few windows on street level grimy. Marquee advertising
Eat at Yesterday’s
Texas Catfish
No. Just, no.
One Ford Ram pickup ahead of us, transporting a single church pew in its bed. I worried what the spattering of rain drops would do to the polished wood. Then I worried if I needed to buy new windshield wipers. I worried that if I went to my friend Susan’s mother’s memorial, I’d bring COVID with me, infect some sweet Presbyterian octogenarian or decorated Navy vet. And I worried that if I didn’t go, she’d never know how much she meant to me. I worried that this new year would see even more memorials. I worried about my own father, a cancerous quasi-Presbyterian octogenarian Navy vet. Would I be attending his memorial by the end of this year, this 2020-too?
I worried about the girl with the black plastic lip ring in Meth-town where we’d stopped for a Subway sandwich. I worry about meth. And what’s in Subway sandwiches. I worry about plastic.
I worry.
When I was asleep in Room 116 of The Travelodge, I worried about…
NOTHING.
Not since the whores of Babylon spread their legs on sheets of flax and goat gut was anyone happier to be horizontal, thin blanket and mystery rash upon waking notwithstanding. If Babylon’s finest didn’t complain, then neither shall I.
I’m a list-maker. I’m a re-setter. And so help me, I love a good New Year’s Resolution. Usually I make several, and I share them, but this year the list was short and mostly private. But I will tell you that one item on it was to complain LESS. If these pages have read like a 300-mile long whine-fest, that has not been my intention.
The French have elevated saying-what-something-is-by-stating-what-it-is-not to an art form. Il ne fait pas chaud, they’ll say, on the coldest night of the year, a mile up in the mountains of Colorado, when their husband leaves the window open so that tiny flakes of snow can blow in between the slats of the wooden blinds.
Il ne fait pas chaud means, “It’s not warm.” It’s a very sophisticated form of passive-aggression, a means of saying “It’s frigging freezing in here, you heedless jolthead. Shut the goddamn window.” by not saying that at all. Instead, with a deadpan expression, you utter “It’s not warm.”
I’m telling you in all seriousness, I’m not complaining, but know this about me: I will tell you I’m lying and that I always tell the truth, and you will have a hard time trusting me coming or going. I could say I had a terrible year. The worst is over. The best is yet to come. The worrying has worked its way onto a side street and parked itself in an abandoned lot and there it will stay, like a looked-over cargo train motionless on its tracks.
Sometimes, you have to squint and fix your eyes on the horizon to tell if the locomotive engine is moving at all. Sometimes you have to find a new perspective.
I’m not lying about the worrying or the doughnut shop or the prisons or praying for peace or being wide awake.
Worry loves it when we stay awake, staring at walls and ceilings and counting our pitfalls instead of our mountain summits. The best way to conquer that kind of worry is to find Louise’s kind of being awake. Bono’s kind. To set the spirit free, break away into the light and to the day.
Under the all-day skies, in a blue car with my gorgeous, lovable, stinky-ass butthead family, I set my spirit a little freer. The whole trip was not heavenly. And water is not dry and doughnuts are not yucky. And The Memphis Texas Travelodge is hands-down The Best motel-hotel-holiday inn ever ever ever. No lie. The End.
PS - We passed a fifth prison in so many hours. The parking lot was full. A herd of healthy horses, free and wild, grazed the lush green fields surrounding the grounds. Ironic, much? We were sixty minutes from home. And the truth was, I was wide awake, praying for peace.