American Pie

On being in the car, taking a good old-fashioned road trip, and a stint in the South

On the 405 just south of the Sepulveda Pass, my dad asked us—me in the front seat for once, Michael in the back—whether we’d ever heard the song “American Pie.” We hadn’t. He clicked it on and sang all the words. Eight minutes of them.

I spent $1.29 on iTunes that night and downloaded the song onto my black iPod Nano. I listened to it over and over so come next Friday when he picked us up at school in the Valley and took us from the 101 to the 405 down to the South Bay I could croon the words with him.

I remember him taking his eyes off the road and a break from singing to marvel at me. A lot of my life was (and is?) lived in pursuit of that marveling.

For many Fridays, at least eight minutes of our drive washed away with whiskey and rye. I don’t think we ever sang it on Monday mornings when he drove us back to the Valley. “American Pie” was the anthem to kick off a euphoric weekend ahead. The “Mark & Brian Show” on KLOS was reserved for the solemn Monday morning march back to school, back to reality.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized just how little time I had with my dad. (Not because he’s dead, just because of a custody agreement.) Most of my memories are on the freeway. Is that being dramatic? I mean, I remember the trips, the soccer tournaments, the summers at the beach and in the pool, but mostly it’s driving. Even the song I associate with him has to do with driving.

Soon, we even lost that commute once Michael got his license and the family’s GMC Eukon. He and I still sang “American Pie,” relying on the cassette player adapter which somehow allowed us to play music from our phone on a car from 2001’s speakers. Michael used to say the audio sounded crisper after we filled up the gas. After that era, I drove myself. I even wrote a Common Application essay about the catharsis of singing alone in my car on those drives. I didn’t get into that school.

After living in Seattle for a decade, I despise driving. I regularly wear a sweatshirt that proclaims “I’m no dummy, I take the bus!” I pride myself on being multimodal. Yet, these past few weeks, I’ve been back in the car again.

I am in Raleigh, North Carolina. After much consternation, I ended up tagging along with Harry on his short-term work relocation. We left on January 1 after a whirlwind of a December.

Let’s do a quick recap:

Diving two to three times every day for a week in Indonesia. A boat, a plane, an all-out sprint through the Jakarta airport, another plane, still another plane to get back to LA. A plane to Portland. Christmas, suddenly, at my mom’s. Reunited with Cricket. Nothing days in a recliner. Discovering “The Family Stone” is the perfect Christmas movie. Then, our time in the car started.

We drove up to Mineral, Washington to spend time with Harry’s family. Cricket in the back clueless to the plan. We sit around the living room with the women of the family and discuss their parents’ divorce out of earshot. Later, the kids gather in the same spot and discuss their parents’ divorce. I am, somehow, an active participant. I’m part of the family now, huh? Well, it really does feel like I always have been.

We sleep in a barn. Cricket is stressed. We drive home and are there for a beat. Enough time to breathe, not enough time to relax. Drunk on the eve of New Year’s Eve I spill secrets to confidants. Thanks to a probiotic drink I heard about on a podcast ad and then spent $10 on, I don’t have a hangover the next day. Nothing special happens on actual New Year’s Eve except the stress of the impending move makes me resent Harry—just for the night.

The next morning we load up the car with the possessions we deem necessary for two months-ish in Raleigh.

On the road. We make it to Butte, Montana in one day. Over ten hours of driving. Cricket does not appreciate being addled by Gabapentin. He desires knowledge. What is outside the door of this Motel 6? Snow, voices, the rot of a town eaten from the inside by the thing that gave it life—a pit full of 6.5 trillion gallons of toxic sludge from an open pit mine.

We hit the road again. Cricket is sober this time. He wanders around the trunk during a stint in a Montana Dairy Queen parking lot. He is calmer knowing what there is to know. We are calmer, too.

Wyoming wows us at golden hour with its hills of wheat, shining. Its mountains stay shadowed in plum. We understand the lyrics of “America the Beautiful.”

I drive while Harry calls hotels. Do you take cats? He learns to start the calls this way. “Cats?” an incredulous staff member at a “pet-friendly” hotel responds. She places us on hold. We joke that she probably thought we meant the musical. “‘Yeah, we take cats, but only if they’re jellicle,’” Harry riffs. “Pet-friendly,” we realize, means “dog-friendly.” It is a dog’s world.

Christian at the Deadwood, South Dakota Travelodge says Travelodge is always happy to welcomes cats. We settle in and wander the snow-covered town for dinner. The Jackpot Patrol vehicle drives away, the driver yelling, “Not a taxi!” when we try to ask whether we can park in a certain place. We couldn’t. We each eat something with buffalo in it.

The next morning we have breakfast for 79 cents at the First Gold Hotel. We gamble away $5. We drive to Mount Rushmore because we probably should see it. Temperatures hover in the teens. Fog obscures the monument. We have been to Mount Rushmore. We have yet to see it.

A Taco Bell feast for dinner in nowhere, Minnesota. An entire greasy, gas station pizza in Wisconsin, eaten on the road. Chicago, then, and a reunion with Nicole, the only other person who I’ve been on a cross-country roadtrip with. She feeds us salmon and vegetables. We leave early the next morning to beat a snow storm. It catches us in Ohio. We won’t make it to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, home of the Mothman.

We pull off the freeway moments after a sedan spins out and off the road in front of us. We’ve never been happier to be at an Ohio Travelodge. We hunker down. With the whole town covered in record snowfall, Domino’s “Emergency Pizza” takes on a whole new level of meaning.

Despite more snow in the forecast, we brave the roads in West Virginia to take us home. After multiple 10 hour-plus driving days, we make it to Raleigh.

I thought I could be free of the car once we arrived. Stupid.

In my short time here—one interrupted by a stint back in Seattle (it’s hard to relocate fully when your entire career centers around the goings on of a particular city)—I have realized how much the rest of the American world relies on the car. Don’t believe me? Here we are at the Patriot Travel Plaza:

People we’ve met have described places based on what the parking is like. One local warned us against public transit here because it was “sketchy.” We later learned he had never taken any public transit here. Was that how I used to talk growing up in LA? The coffee shop closest to us is 30 minutes walking along a busy thoroughfare with disappearing sidewalks—it’s a three minute drive.

Griping and resisting being behind the wheel only made me miserable. So, I am adapting. I am driving. Stupidly, I keep wearing that bus sweatshirt even though I haven’t taken a bus since being here. I, inconceivably, need to fill up gas despite having started the week with a full tank. Soon, I think, I will turn on “American Pie.”