Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Part 19

The following day we made it as far as Savannah, Georgia. We had ventured into town, after being told by a gas station attendant that Savannah was "the real Spring Break capital of the world." Along the waterfront, scores of bars were bursting with young drunks, whooping at category-five force. We stumbled along the wharf, clinging to the railing opposite the bars as we listened to the belligerent shouts from behind the ma.s.s of neon beer signs. As we had shoved off from our tame little hippie school, we had bragged to the few who would listen that we were ready to party with the big boys. But now that the big boys were pounding Jager shots not twenty feet away, it seemed apt to question whether the big boys were ready to party with us, or more to the point, whether the sight of us after several hundred beers would inspire them to beat us into bowls of turnip soup.

"Spring Break, my eyeball," Frank said.

The causes for our reluctance apparently did not translate into Italian, however, for before we could hold her back, Carmella broke away from our group, charging toward a bar that was about to explode from the reverberations of a Scorpions song. "I thought you guys want to party! Come on, let's get into fun!"

We glanced at each other and chuckled. I tried to explain. "Carmella, this isn't the real party. We shouldn't waste ourselves here."

"Don't be such a gay. I want some dancing!"

The Ayatollah pleaded. "We really need to get on the road if we're going to get to Florida tomorrow."

"You guys are ridiculous." In front of the bar, a cl.u.s.ter of young men in football jerseys were fighting, playfully or for real we couldn't tell, because the only time anyone ever shoved anyone at Hamps.h.i.+re was for demonstration purposes in hara.s.sment workshops. To the side of the fighting cl.u.s.ter, one of the combatants stopped for a breather. He teetered violently on the brink between falling over and throwing up. Just as he seemed to have settled on the former, however, he looked our way. Suddenly, he straightened and squinted through the darkness at us, as though the appearance of our little cl.u.s.ter across the wharf was some kind of apparition, possibly an unadvertised unpleasant side effect of his dollar-a-cup Miller Genuine Draft and Jagermeister. He looked to his friends, as if to see if anyone else saw us, but they were preoccupied with punching each other in the face. Undecided, he stared for a few moments more and we stood in our cl.u.s.ter and stared back at him. Then an inspiration struck. Smiling, he gathered himself together and, with all his might, threw his beer bottle at us. Considering his inebriation, his aim was remarkably good and the bottle shattered just inches from our feet.

"Hey!" Carmella yelled, and charged toward him. In balletic syncopation, the rest of us leapt gracefully forward, grabbed her by the shoulders, and hauled her back to the car, as she fumed and cursed that we'd let him get away with that.

Speeding out of town, haunted by the specter of the flying bottle, we tried to shake off the omen and its meaning for our trip.

"That's Savannah. No one goes there," Zach said. "Daytona Beach is going to love us."

"We were made for Daytona Beach, not that wharf bar c.r.a.p," Tollah agreed.

Soon enough, we convinced ourselves that Savannah had been an aberration peopled with mere drop-in traffic. What we brought to the table could only be appreciated by the dedicated full time party animals we'd find in Daytona.

Taking my turn behind the wheel, however, I noticed that the car, as if voicing our inner worries, was handling a little sluggishly. "Ayatollah," I asked, "how come I can't get this thing above fifty?"

"I think we're just too weighed down with stuff," he said. That answer made sense enough for me to brush away any sense of worry I felt.

That night, Frank angrily protested the waste of spending twenty-five dollars on a motel when real working people would just sleep out in the open. To prove his point, he unfurled his sleeping bag in some bushes along the driveway outside our room and spent the night there. In the morning, he proudly declined our invitation, delivered with some urgency, to come in and use the shower.

Within seconds of driving into Daytona Beach, the car was collectively transfixed by a riddle: What the h.e.l.l did we think we were going to do here? We had thrown the word partying around a lot, mostly because it was anathema at Hamps.h.i.+re. But as we drove through the streets of Daytona, it struck each of us like a lightning bolt-we really had no idea what partying meant. Back at Hamps.h.i.+re, a "party" was what happened when students squeezed into a dank, mold-ridden, freezing-cold stairwell to wait on a line for flat beer while some sort of ancient funk music fried the speakers of a crummy old boom box and we shuffled around trying to keep warm, muttering, "This place sucks," to each other until the keg ran dry. In high school, all of us, except perhaps Carmella, had been for various reasons alienated from the social whirl and thus we didn't have three "ragers" to reminisce about between us. The Ayatollah, Zach, Frank, Carmella, and I had certainly had fun in our time at college, but that "fun" had usually been of a semi-solitary nature, like playing video games or making crank calls or driving to a distant diner, or cheering on an attempt to break the world's record for most hot dogs consumed in a minute, but none of these experiences gave us much sense of what it meant "to party," let alone to "par-tay."

But after years of ignorance, driving the first two blocks of downtown Daytona filled in many of the gaps in our education. We came into town high-fiving that we had made it; naysayers be d.a.m.ned, our day of partying was at hand. Zach threw the Stray Cats into the tape deck and we blasted "Rock This Town." Then we glanced around. Rows of s.h.i.+rtless boys lined every sidewalk in an endless row of deck chairs, bellowing at traffic and saluting the bikinied girls walking by. Our car crawled through the main drag and we were swallowed by a vast tide of drunken, loud people in bathing suits, any one of whom-we quickly did the math-could pummel the five of us into potato latkes before breakfast and still have strength left to rip the Volvo to shreds with his bare hands and eat it one piece at a time. As our car paused in front of each deck chair, a frat boy would gaze at the carful of geeks with hate in his eyes-although, in retrospect, they may have been squinting at the sun.

We parked and walked onto the beach, stepping into a gyrating field of thousands upon thousands of perfectly tanned, perfectly formed, undulating young bodies. We couldn't have felt more out of place if we'd enlisted as first-string sopranos in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. We tiptoed our way between the blankets, even Frank taking extra care not to knock over any beer cups. Dressed in black jeans, high-top sneakers, wool sweaters, and hooded jackets, we looked like we had arrived to collect an unwanted corpse. Salt 'n' Pepa's "Push It" blasted the beach from giant speakers up at a hotel. By the pool, we could hear an announcer summoning the faithful to a belly flop compet.i.tion.

When we found a free square of sand, we stopped and looked at each other.

"What's wrong you guys?" Carmella asked. "Don't you want to be swimming in the ocean?" Down the beach the ocean was packed with people throwing Frisbees, riding on each other's shoulders, making out in the waves.

"I didn't bring a bathing suit," I said.

"You come to Florida with no suit?" Carmella was incredulous.

"I don't have one."

"I guess I forgot to bring mine too," Zach said. Carmella looked disbelievingly at Tollah and Frank, who nodded-they, too, had neglected to bring swimming gear.

As Carmella berated us, it occurred to me that we could probably buy cheap swimming trunks at any of the fifteen thousand gift shops we'd pa.s.sed in town, but I decided to keep that thought to myself.

Carmella continued her harangue, abusing us at the top of her lungs, her English, now that she was excited, completely indecipherable. People on nearby blankets turned to look at the strange woman cursing in gibberish at four young dorks fully dressed in black wool and standing in the middle of a beach. It took all of about eight seconds for the most muscle-bound pair in the city to intervene.

"Are these losers bothering you, baby?" the blond one asked.

"Want us to get rid of them?" the blonder one joined.

"Yes, please!" Carmella answered without hesitation.

We considered our options. Comparing notes later, we all agreed that our first and most attractive thought was to tell the Hercules twins, "Take our woman, please! Just let us live!" In fact, I did squeak, "You can have her!" Looking around at the hostile crowd, we fumbled for something else to say as Carmella explained her predicament to the blonds in an unintelligible tongue.

It was Frank who broke the tension with an inspiration. "How would you boys like to hear a song?" he asked.

"What?" They made as if to punch him.

He took out his guitar from the case and started strumming, beckoning in tune, "Gather around, everybody! The Men of the Road featuring the Italian are here!" He started playing a song, Roger Miller's "King of the Road," and nodded to us to sing along. Dutifully, and with no better ideas, Zach, the Ayatollah, and I joined in, braying like a pack of hounds, "Ain't got no cigarettes!" a heartfelt but ultimately incompetent version of the cla.s.sic. The crowd listened, more puzzled than approving, and when we were done they regarded us with a wary silence. They seemed to be appraising whether the amount of meat to be gotten off our bones made it worth the trouble to kill us. One of the blonds broke the moment.

"Gimme that!" he said, grabbing Frank's guitar, which he handed over without a peep. He bent a knee, hunched over the instrument, and beat a blues chord out of it. For the next two hours we watched as various members of the crowd tried to pluck out B. B. King songs on Frank's guitar. Apparently, when frat boys get into the blues, they suddenly see the value of having weirdos around, giving them a chance to demonstrate their kins.h.i.+p with the wretched of the earth.

We drove to a Denny's a few blocks off the beach. The Volvo was handling even more sluggishly than it had on the highway, sort of drifting indecisively through intersections without ever quite picking up and lunging forward. We all conferred on the matter and decided that crowded city driving was an awkward change for the car after so many hours on the open highway.

Denny's was packed and we were the only people other than the ninety-year-old hostess not wearing swimsuits. At the neighboring table two couples were making out. We stared glumly at them, except for Carmella, who was trying to get the jukebox at our table to play "Push It," a song that had captured her imagination after her introduction to it at the beach.

"I've got an idea," Zach said. "How about we go home?"

"Just like that?" Tollah asked.

"Well, yeah. Maybe," I said.

"I can't believe you guys," Frank spat. "All your big talk and it turns out you're afraid of anyone who doesn't have a textbook in their hand."

"If you didn't notice," Zach said, "your good friends out there wanted us dead."

"All I know is I'm not leaving this town until I get laid at least twice."

"Oh, yeah, you were beating them off with a stick on the beach, Romeo." Tollah laughed.

"I've had it with you fools holding me back. Tonight, I'm on my own and you just watch."

As quickly as our illusions about Daytona had faded, none of us wanted to miss the spectacle of Frank trying to hit on girls. And when it came down to it, none of us were willing to admit to ourselves, or to the jury we'd face back at school, that after all the bravado about partying in the majors we'd thrown around, we'd fled from the face of partying in less than twelve hours. At least, we weren't ready to admit that yet.

"LEMME HEAR YOU SAY, 'YEAH!' "

We huddled together in fright as a crowd of thousands hoisted their fists and bellowed back at the announcer a blood-curdling war cry of "YEAH!"

"LEMME HEAR YOU SAY, 'h.e.l.l YEAH!!!!!' "

The chorus thundered back. Even Carmella seemed alarmed. We pushed our way through the crowd at the poolside nightclub, threading through the s.h.i.+rtless tans as daintily as possible.

"LEMME HEAR YOU SAY, SPRING BREAK '88 KICKS a.s.s!"

"So when are you going to start getting laid?" Zach shouted to Frank.

Struggling to retain his composure before the thundering crowd, Frank remained unbowed. "Just get me to the front. I need some room to operate."

"YOU GUYS ARE AN-EE-MALLS!"

We found an air pocket to the side of the stage just as the wet T-s.h.i.+rt contest began, and we paused for a moment to savor the symbolic triumph. Months after nearly being expelled for joking about a wet T-s.h.i.+rt contest, we had lived to show them all. As Frank wandered off, Zach, the Ayatollah, and I smiled at each other, drinking in the satisfaction of victory.

Half a second later, it occurred to us that we were going to die.

Pressing in from all sides were nearly naked, very drunk young men, waving their fists at the women shaking it onstage. To urge them on? To threaten them? Was this the kickoff of a beer-based revolution? We were unsure, but Carmella, for once, showed signs of alarm. "I think maybe we should not be being here," she said.

"No one wants to party?" Zach asked.

Across the crowd, Frank chatted with a pair of bikinied girls. Actually, he looked like he was arguing with them more than chatting. Onstage the MC was berating the crowd to stop throwing ice at the wet T-s.h.i.+rt contestants. I looked back at Frank. The girls had been joined by a phalanx of about seven men who glowered down at Frank from Olympian heights above. He threw up his hands and marched away.

"So did you get any?" the Ayatollah asked.

"I wouldn't touch these girls if you paid me," Frank fumed.

I looked around at the thousands of girls in the crowd, any one of whom by conventional standards and symmetrical considerations would have made the best-looking girl at Hamps.h.i.+re. I tried to imagine a world where I might talk to girls like these, where I would just walk over and start chatting to them like the hordes of my collegiate peers surrounding me seemed to have no trouble doing. My fantasy conversations got no farther than me asking, "What's your major?" before they evaporated under the weight of their implausibility.

"Let's get out of here," Frank ordered. For once, no one paused to taunt him.

We spent that night at a campground just outside of Daytona. Frank was satisfied that we were living at least on the earth, if not off it, and graciously agreed to sleep in the tent with us. The campground, however, was not filled with quite as many soulful hobos as he would've chosen to bunk with; the patrons by and large being the spillover from the beachfront area. From tents cl.u.s.tered tightly across the patchy lawn, squeals and groans of lovemaking filled the night, while small fiestas formed around open car trunks and impromptu tapped pony kegs. Trying to plan our next move, we studied a map of Florida and realized we were not more than a three-hour drive from Disney World. Zach and I, who a.s.sociated Disney with the comforts of our L.A. roots, suggested to the others that we should wake up and drive straight for Orlando. Carmella and the Ayatollah were game for any escape. Frank could only shake his head and mutter, "Figures."

When we had checked out our tent from the college Wilderness Office, Tollah and I had waved away the clerk's attempts to demonstrate how to set it up, telling him we were sure we'd have no problem, we were second-years after all. The instruction sheet he had forced into my hand had long since been swallowed by the mounting rubble on the Volvo's floor. We spread the tent parts out on the gra.s.s, Carmella beaming a flashlight onto them. Very quickly it became clear that there was no way we were going to be able to erect this thing. As I looked over the poles, it seemed impossible that they would fit together and hold up a tent tarp. Pieces that looked like carburetors and coffee urns suggested no clear usage.

"How is it possible that all of you together can be this stupid?" Carmella asked.

"It's our specialty," Zach shot back. "Why did you think we went to a joke school?"

Halfway through the night, by hanging strings from a tree branch and taping the ends to the top of the tent tarp, we managed to marginally make it stand. It looked like it would hold as long as no one moved inside. Which suggested another issue. Inspected inside, the tent looked like it was made to sleep a pair of campers, possibly three very skinny ones.

"Are you idiots sure this is a five-person tent?" Frank asked.

Tollah and I blinked at each other. "I'm pretty sure we said something about that."

I was too wound up from the day's struggle to fall asleep anyway. I sat up reading California Dreamin' by flashlight. Mich.e.l.le Phillips told of her pride when the t.i.tle song was released and how many lives it changed in the sixties. She wrote about a lawyer in New York who, after hearing the song, left his wife and children to move out to L.A. and follow his dream.

The next morning, we drove southwest on a four-lane highway bisecting Florida's middle. The garish beach gift shops soon gave way to miles of swamp-lined tarmac. We stared, dazed, out the window as we charged deeper into the rain forest.

We weren't more than twenty minutes outside of Daytona before it was clear that something funny was happening with the Volvo; rasping, dry-heaving coughs echoed up from under the hood, and urging the car to even fifty miles per hour was becoming a ch.o.r.e. It lunged forward in mad bursts of energy before sinking into barely mobile torpor. The thought of what might be the problem, however, was so horrifying that we each privately vowed not to speak of it, as if we could vanquish the demon with our silent treatment-the strategy we'd each applied to our studies thus far at Hamps.h.i.+re to great effect.

None of us had slept much the night before in the cramped, suffocating tent, nor had we bathed that morning-the communal showers at the campground were too crowded for any of us to dare-and the quickie breakfast of three parts caffeine, one part grease had left us all a little aching and jittery. Perhaps, I thought, riding shotgun, I'm just getting the nerves about nothing. But very quickly it was clear that it wasn't nothing, and that ignoring the car's troubles wasn't going to make them go away. About an hour out of Daytona, Zach was the first to speak up.

"Ayatollah, is this really the fastest the car can go?"

Tollah, at the wheel, stared straight ahead at the road. "Yeah. It is."

"Does it have enough gas?" I asked.

"About two-thirds of a tank." We inched along the road, now barely making thirty miles per hour. Traffic careened by, honking indignantly, a few giant trucks barely swerving away from a collision as they sped around us.

"Maybe we should drive on the shoulder?" Frank asked.

"Maybe you want to get this thing looked at," Zach said.

Tollah nodded. "Yeah, maybe."

At about eleven A.M., forty miles shy of Orlando, we pulled off the highway and into the first service station we saw. The man on duty took one look at our car chugging in and said, "You folks need a m.u.f.fler!" We looked at each other and tried to nod in a knowing, just-as-I-thought agreement.

"Can you put one in?" Tollah asked.

"I think so. Don't work on these Europeans very often." We told him we needed to get it fixed up quick, saying this in the most overbearing, intimidating voices we could muster to show him we weren't just a bunch of dumb nineteen-year-olds from an expensive but silly school in the hills of Ma.s.sachusetts; we were seasoned motorists on intimate terms with our vehicle's private regions. The mechanic seemed duly impressed, nodded, and went back to the bay without speaking a word to us.

We spent the rest of the morning and afternoon in his waiting area, drinking from the Mr. Coffee and leafing through his collection of sports and mechanical journals. A six-month-old copy of U.S. News and World Report sustained each of us for a spell. I read from the previous December about the problems President Reagan was having with his Supreme Court nominee. "Does anyone know what happened with this Bork character?" I asked. "Sounds like a kook. Is he in charge of the courts now?" The others shrugged listlessly.

An hour pa.s.sed and we saw no sign of the mechanic. Tedious as it was, we felt relief knowing that the shadow that had loomed over our trip now had a name, "m.u.f.fler," and a solution, and that in just a few minutes more, all would be righted and order restored to the heavens. Another hour pa.s.sed, and another. In the midafternoon, Tollah and I crept over to the bay to see if he was still there. Indeed, he was digging deep inside the Volvo's innards and brusquely waved us away when we asked how it was going.

"Is a m.u.f.fler under the hood?" Tollah asked.

I nodded. "I'm pretty sure it is."

As the sun was starting to set, and Carmella and Zach had pa.s.sed out on the waiting area floor, the mechanic appeared. He was drenched from head to toe in grease and had a wild look in his eyes, as though he'd just emerged from battling a fearsome beast, barely escaping with his life.

"Well"-he panted-"the m.u.f.fler is in."

"Good!" We cheered. "That's terrific!"

"But if you want to drive that car, you're going to need a new engine and a new transmission."

We gaped.

"How much?" I asked, abandoning all pretense of looking like I knew what I was talking about. "How much would that cost and how long would it take?"

The mechanic stared at us for a moment and then, with a deep hound-dog-like sorrow, shook his head and said, "I have no idea." He handed us a bill for four hundred dollars for the new m.u.f.fler.

Despite the mechanic's advice that we leave the Volvo to die with dignity, we took the keys and drove it fifteen miles per hour down the service road along the highway, retracing our tracks to a Jellystone Park Campground Carmella had spotted earlier. We checked into the Yogi Bear-themed facility and rented a camping plot, a little triangle of lawn next to a parking s.p.a.ce. About half the campground was devoted to semipermanent trailer-dwelling residents, the rest to a collection of itinerant campers, most of whom could be loosely cla.s.sified as "bikers." On the plot across from ours a couple of s.h.i.+rtless, thin, rangy-looking fellows sat on the ground, leaning against the tires of their car, and snarled at us while we unpacked the car and spread our belongings across the lawn.

As darkness fell, we struggled to jury-rig our tent, erecting another dubious contraption of pulleys and misused stakes certain to collapse during the night. We glanced around for veteran campers who might advise us, but by this hour the neighboring plots showed no signs of life.

We dined by the light of a single yellowish bulb sticking out of the side wall of Jellystone's hot dog stand. Beneath it I noticed a peeling mural of Yogi and Boo Boo running off with a pic-a-nic basket. The campground by night seemed deserted except for the surly teenager manning the snack bar. It was only eight o'clock, far too early to sleep. I wondered how we would pa.s.s the evening. Silence prevailed as we nibbled on our dogs, each of us deep in his own thoughts.

"Is there a town we could go into?" Zach asked.

"I think it's about ten miles down the road," Tollah said.

"We probably shouldn't risk taking the car there. . . ."