Benjamin Markovits: You Don't Have to Live Like This

“Greg,” she said, before I turned away. “I know you won’t do anything deliberately stupid. That’s not your style. But you’re the kind of person who could get himself into situations that you won’t be very good at getting out of. There will be people there who don’t want you there. They don’t think like you do—”

“You mean black people?” I said.

“That’s not what I said. That’s not what I mean. But I’ve been doing what Brad always tells me not to do, I’ve been looking things up on the computer. Detroit is the number one most violent city in America.”

“No worse than New Orleans.”

“New Orleans is bad enough — that’s why we moved out. But there are good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. From what I understand, you plan on living right in the middle of the worst.”

“You’re totally out of touch with these things, Mom. All you know is what you read online or see on TV. The news and entertainment industries in this country sell fear, it’s what they do, because people like you want to buy it. But that doesn’t make it true.”

“Who is they? I don’t know who they is. This is starting to make me angry. You said yourself it’s a war zone.”

“That wasn’t me, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to have this conversation now.”

Bending down, I kissed her good night again, and then again and again on each cheek, to lighten the mood. But she only sat there, softening into grumpiness. “You’re making a joke out of it. It’s not a joke.”

“Can I say one thing?” I said. “Don’t blame Dad for lending me the money.”

This conversation left a taste in my mouth, because of what I said or what she said, I don’t know. It’s unpleasant to see your parents for what they are, limited people. But you get into stupid fights with them anyway, you’re all tangled up. And afterwards you have to deal with the fact that you don’t always believe your own point of view.

My dreams that night were very near the surface, they were very plausible. I was getting gas and looking through my wallet for dollar bills. It was a full-service station and I never know how much to tip. Later, back on the road, the lanes seemed narrow, there was a problem with my headlights or the windscreen wipers. I kept falling asleep. I should have pulled over but that’s how people get killed in this country, sleeping by the side of the highway. So I lowered the window to let some fresh air in. That only helped a little, every few seconds my head jerked up. I could hear my father in the kitchen, making French toast, and then he came into my bedroom singing, Wake up, you beautiful girl , which had been playing on the radio.

After breakfast we loaded up the car. My mother kept thinking of something else for me to take and cluttered the trunk with a hundred odd things for setting up house — a flashlight, packs of batteries and toilet paper, her old coffeemaker. But then there was nothing else and I drove off.

She waited in the driveway until she couldn’t see me — this is what she always does after our visits home. I watched her in the rearview mirror. When I turned the corner, and a new street slid over to replace the street I grew up on, with other houses and trees and nobody standing in the drive, I felt like you feel when you put the phone down and the room is suddenly different.

Around lunchtime I stopped at the Walmart outside Hattiesburg and bought a gun. The guy behind the counter — a black guy, as it happens, with a dude-like mustache — was low-key, practical and encouraging.

“What do you want it for?” he said.

“Duck hunting. I’m just getting started.”

“We got a Ruger Red Label. That’s a real classic gun, a nice starter gun. It’ll last you, too.”

“Last time I went out I used a Remington.”

So he suggested a Remington 870 Express with a compact pump and listed other specs, which I didn’t understand.

“Will it fit under the seat of my car?”

“What are you driving?” he said and handed me the catalog to look at while the FBI check cleared. There was a form you had to fill out — I gave my parents’ address in Baton Rouge. Afterwards, we talked about shells.

“It depends what you want to use it for,” he said. “Are we talking home defense or hunting ducks? Because there’s different things I’d recommend.” He also suggested a couple of accessories, a TacStar SideSaddle, an Elzetta light mount, with a Fenix LD10. “That’s a strong light,” he said. “If that catch somebody in the eye, give you an extra couple of seconds. Give you a chance to see who it is.” He put everything in a doubled-up paper bag.

I picked up some car snacks, too, chips and soda and brown bread and sliced cheese. As I pulled back onto I-59 a crowd of feelings went over me in a wave. Here we go, I thought, here we come. But I still had another fifteen hours of driving, and a night to get through at a Days Inn motel, before reaching Detroit.

Part of the point of driving was to see America, but you don’t see much of America from the road. My views on each side were confined to billboards, exit signs and gas stations. The tallest building I came across between Nashville and Louisville was an ExxonMobil gas tower straddling a patch of juniper grass by the side of the highway. I stopped every few hundred miles to fill the tank, or stock up on caffeine, or take a leak, or eat — mostly at Wendy’s and Subway, as close to the exit ramp as I could find them. There are no locals at these places. The people I saw picking hot sandwiches out of Styrofoam had set their car keys and wallets on the table next to cups of takeaway coffee.

I wanted to make it to Louisville but started dreaming about driving instead of actually driving and pulled off about fifty miles short. It was nine o’clock — a coolish spring highway-flavored evening, with cars like crickets making a low continuous noise in the dark. My motel room was part of a row of cabins running in a long line off the parking lot. The bed linen smelled like cigarettes and air-conditioning. Even after a swim in the roadside pool I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing headlights coming at me and moving past. Everything felt like a computer game.

Then around two a.m. someone started banging next door. A drunk man trying to persuade a girl to let him in. “I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do,” he said. “You took my fucking money pretty willing.” This went on an unbelievable length of time — I guess he was drunk enough to be patient. He certainly didn’t mind repeating himself. “Don’t make me the angry guy outside the door,” he said.

I lay in bed, listening, but either the girl let him in or he gave up or I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew a truck was reversing in the parking lot, and my inside elbow lay over my eyes to keep the sun out.

North of Louisville the landscape started to change, and by the time I got lost in Dayton, looking for lunch, I’d crossed the weather line. There was fresh snow on the parked cars and hedges of dirty snow between them. When I set out from Baton Rouge the previous morning, a white blanket of cloud held the heat in. The Taurus had leather seats, which stuck to my T-shirt, which stuck to my back. For most of that first day’s drive, through the open window, the air flowed over my face as hot as a Laundromat. Even outside Louisville, the night was mild enough I could walk barefoot from the pool to my motel room after a swim.

But it was cold in Dayton, and wet in the wind from the snow. I parked outside a Popeye’s and spent a couple of minutes standing in shorts and digging out a pair of jeans from my duffel in the trunk.