I am the lock, she is the key; foot meets gas pedal and we are a Springsteen song on the open road; we’re Kurt Cobain howling in pain and Patti Smith reminding us that Jesus, well, he died for somebody’s sins but sure as hell not ours, and the next stop will be whatever we decide; I’ve got two hundred and thirty-seven dollars of pizza delivery tips rolled inside a sock in the glove compartment; our friends and enemies can wither the day with gerunds and geometry and lunch room blather, we’re chasing the higher angels now, whoever and wherever they may be, and yes, I’m actually saying this, words form in my throat and fill the car like soap bubbles, Amy beat-tapping the dashboard shouting, “Well said, sire! Well said!” after each lunatic burst, and eventually we’ll tire but still enthralled with the blank open spaces of National Whatever Day we clasp hands… and accelerate.
. . . . .
We swing by Sarah Carpenter’s house so Amy can brush Sarah’s curls before day care, one hundred strokes with a pink comb and brush, a ritual Amy never misses. Sarah’s mother Laura is a dirty blonde nicotine patch, a boardwalk-stand gold crucifix dangling over fake breasts, a tattoo of a black crow with an arrow through its heart on the back of her neck, but she is always grateful for the time-out we give her from all that Mommy stuff, nobody ever told poor Laura it was be so non-stop. While Sarah and Amy curl up on the couch, I grab a stuffed monkey and put on a puppet show until Laura grabs her daughter and chases us out, already late, goddamn it, and why won’t those day care bastards ever give her a break? She clerks part-time in the same real estate office where Amy’s mother hangs her license; eventually her constant bitching prompts Mrs. Willingham to volunteer her teenage daughter for babysitting duties, despite Amy’s avowed disinterest in children or formal work of any kind. Yet from Day One, Amy is smitten. As Laura dumps Sarah into her car seat and tightens the straps, Amy stands on the sidewalk waving and blowing kisses as if we are the parents, Laura merely an intrusion into our happy little troika. From the back seat, Sarah waves goodbye as the beat-up Dodge Charger scrapes the driveway and disappears down the block.
From there we are off. We stop at a diner off Exit 130 and order French fries and toast and a large carafe of black coffee. I hate the stuff, but Amy needs her morning transfusion; insisting that I drink some too, no room for narcolepsy on this train, not today; she pours me half a mug and watches until my face screws bitter and swallows it down. She flips over the paper placemat and starts drawing my caricature, a giant-head baby man with mud slide eyes.
“Where should we go, what should we do, Scooby-Do?” she says, scratching lines across the cheap paper placemat, looking up at my face every few seconds, studying the angles and slopes, the curly overgrown garden of my hair.
“I’m feeling a bit Kerouac today. Let’s go to the village and hang with the mad ones,” she says. “We’ll make out in a pew at the back of St. Mark’s Church and turn thrift-shop rags into diamonds. I’m sick of the ocean and the sand and all those little birds pecking along the shore. I want concrete and trash and fat angry pigeons waiting to mug you in an alley and steal that hot salty pretzel right from your lips. Are you with me in Rockland, Carl Solomon?”
Are you with me in Rockland?
Amy’s way of testing my limits. For we are both burgeoning artists, and while the theater is my world, Amy gravitates toward Art, poetry and the Beats, Kerouac and Dharma Bums, Ginsberg and his “Howl;” she can recite chunks of it breathless verbatim, watch her storm down the halls of West Ocean Regional shouting “Moloch the Incomprehensible Prison, Moloch the cross-bone soulless jailhouse!” Watch her shouting in the principal’s office, “I’m with you in Rockland, Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland!” Principal Seavers befuddled and scrunched, wondering if Carl Solomon is a freshman or a sophomore and what exactly do you do with a student who cuts class to draw wild rainbow murals on the bathroom wall but still makes honor role? Already she is selling her paintings on the boardwalk each summer, winning ribbons in local exhibitions, and if perhaps I’m ahead of her with my one Young Playwrights Award and the second on its way, it seems that our nascent genius is equal, complementary, and thank God we found each other in that Jersey backwater of a Rockland, Holman Beach. No one understands us, except us, and if perhaps we are bubbled from our peers, outside the circle, the clique, the high school homecoming hierarchy of beer pong house parties, beach bonfires, and most-likely-to-be-everything yearbook smiles, we’ve created
