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One
Channy
Traditionally,
when someone leaves my hometown, there’s drama. Big family arguments,
occasional fistfights, two or three stabbings. I was the exception. We weren’t
the closest of families, but my folks were elated that I had gotten through
school without the common surrender to boredom and drugs. The reason for my
success was largely a mystery. Whether instilled or innate, I possessed an iron
sense of self-worth, and a horse-trader’s notion that I could swap the
mediocrities of today for the glories of tomorrow. Once graduation arrived, a
journey Outside (which is what Alaskans call anywhere not in Alaska) was seen
by all as my just reward.
Because
of my patience and choosiness – and the slapping away of several pairs of hands
belonging to drooling jock lotharios – I earned a reputation as a prude. The
few times I did give away the goodies, this served to elevate the pleasure and
surprise of my happy recipients. Surprise was a natural reaction, anyway,
because my candidates were not on the
roster of Boys Who Get Laid. He had to be nice, he had to be someone I could
control, and he absolutely had to use
a condom, because my autobiography would not be titled Knocked Up in Anchorage. Most importantly, although some attraction
was necessary, I didn’t want it to reach the narcotic level – because, the day
after graduation, I had a date with the lower 48 (I used this phrase so often
that my friends began to sing-song it back to me).
Looking
back on my patterns (as more people should do), I realized that most of my boys
were musicians. The last was James Kitagawa, who was also the best musician. He
was a stocky Japanese boy with a broad Buddha-like face, skin the color of a
toasted marshmallow, and a grin that could light up the whole quad.
The
highlight of our graduation ceremonies came when the choir sang its
commencement song. The song was chosen by a vote of the senior choir members,
which always carried an element of suspense. After four years of Rodgers &
Hammerstein, Brahms and madrigals, they were usually anxious to do something
pop or rock, and I always expected some particularly squirrely class to do
something like “Sympathy for the Devil.”
For
the class of 2001, the choice seemed obvious: “Beautiful Day” by U2. It had an
anthemic quality that seemed naturally choral – like Carmina Burana with guitars – and the hook was celebratory and
hopeful. The bonus came in the verses, which contained all these references to
being stuck somewhere, aching to get out – muddy roads, small towns. Because
really, those were our hopes. Singing
them out loud to our parents (knowing that most of it would go right over their
heads) was the perfect gratuity to our teenage sense of rebellion.
Problem
was, choral arrangements were not exactly on U2’s priority list, so we called
on our resident Mozart (in fact, that was his nickname, “Mozart”). James had
his own after-school jazz ensemble, so surfing this musical no-man’s land was
right up his alley. He already had the basic rock ‘n’ roll lineup – drums,
bass, guitar, himself on keyboards, so all he had to do was throw some of The
Edge’s ringing guitar explosions to his horn section and then get to work on
the vocals.
Bono’s
one of those classic double-gear singers who likes to start low and then jump
the octave when things get exciting (think Orbison, Isaak, Prince). James gave
the low intro to the bass and alti, then handed the chorus sforzando (that’s
“sudden forte”) to the tenors and soprani as the lower voices supplied echoing
harmonies.
The
master stroke arrived with the accelerated lines that Bono sings in the bridge
(U2 always has these – they’re masters of construction). James worked these
into a counterpoint fugue, like a damn Haydn in leather pants. From there, he
built it to a climax by repeating the chorus with verse lines draped over the
top, growing in volume and chaos until he cut us off, leaving the horns, drums
and guitars to finish it off with three big crunchy chords, so like Don Giovanni that I figured it was
James’ private joke, sort of a nickname signature to his high school thesis.
I’m
sorry if I go on about this, but being a part of that performance, standing in
the alto section in the middle of our football field on a bright spring
afternoon, might have been the single event that hooked me on music for good. And I was screwing the arranger.
I almost
got all the way through school without meeting him at all. I met him two months
before, during Breakup (which refers to the ice in the rivers, not to
relationships). I was lollygagging on the senior lawn, where underclassmen are
allowed only by express invitation, when two ideas came into glorious collusion
in my head: 1) the baseball-like hardness of the oranges that came in our lunch
boxes, and 2) the inexplicably deep and dangerous hole that was drilled into
the ground at the far end of the lawn. I sprang to my feet, struck a classic
bowler’s pose and rolled my orange across the grass. It traveled thirty feet,
took a slight left-to-right break, and dropped into the hole with a thud.
James, who
was crouched over a chessboard directly behind the “green,” looked up from his
bishop just in time to witness the entire thing. When he saw what happened, he
jumped to his feet and yelled “Genius! Fucking genius!” Then fell to the lawn and disappeared most of his arm so
he could retrieve my orange and roll it back. Thus are Olympic events and
friendships born.
James was a
classic nerd – all that much cooler because of the way he reveled in it – and
extremely surprised, two weeks later, when I added a friendly crotch-rub to our
makeout repertoire. I assumed he had heard the stories about Channy the Chaste
(also Miss Tightzipper, which, I had to admit, was pretty clever).
“Don’t get
me wrong,” I said. “I am picky. But
the kind of boy I pick is also the kind of boy who keeps a secret. Am I
understood?”
“Small
price,” he said, and smiled. I undid his buttonfly and removed my chewing gum.
After
commencement, I waited for James at the senior lawn. He arrived in his gown,
too rushed by loading his keyboard and accepting praise to bother changing. He
strode my way exactly like a man with a freshly inflated ego, grabbed me by the
waist and swung me in a circle, then planted me with a kiss. I don’t know if it
was good hygiene or natural chemistry, but I could kiss that boy’s mouth for
hours, he was like human candy. After a minute, though, he deflated a bit and
gave me a sad look.
“You’re
absolutely sure.”
“What did I
tell you?”
“Yeah –
‘day after graduation.’”
“Don’t say
I didn’t give you an expiration date.”
“Let me go
with you! I’ll go home and pack right now.”
I kissed
him on his broad nose.
“No way.
It’s the trip of my life, and it’s strictly solo. Besides, you’ve got a muse to
chase.”
“Yes.” He
smiled. “And her name is Ann Arbor.”
“Does
anyone from here ever go further south? Like, I don’t know – Arizona State?”
“You
kiddin’ me? They’d melt!”
I ran a
finger along James’ upper lip and finished it with a kiss.
“I see that
you still have one punch left on your ticket, Herr Mozart. Is there anywhere
you’ve always wanted to…?”
I stopped
when my customary crotch-rub landed on something unexpected.
“God,
Jimmy! Did you have an operation?”
After a
spell of epileptic laughter, Jimmy reached under his gown and pulled out a pair
of rock-hard oranges.
“That’s not
all,” he said. “I also have the keys to the music room, which I neglected to
return after our last rehearsal. I have heard that Mr. Paris’s grand piano is
capable of supporting quite a bit of weight.”
“You know,
Freud would have a field day with you,
Maestro. And so would I.”
That’s the
last time I saw him. Late that summer, a landscaper was driving the freeway
outside Minneapolis. A rolled-up tarp fell out of his truck. Just behind him, a
tow-truck driver pulling a transit bus swerved to miss it and jumped the
meridian. James was driving the other direction, on his way to the University
of Michigan. He never had a chance. “Beautiful Day” shows up on a song slip
about once a month, and I still have a hard time listening.
I’m sorry.
I’m getting ahead of myself. The day after graduation (my personal Valhalla),
the contiguous 48 called me from bed at six o’clock. My dad was already
downstairs, drinking his coffee, and he helped me pile all my belongings into
the truck. When I was all ready, he rousted my mother from sleep so she could
anoint my jacket with tears. Perhaps we didn’t realize how close we were until
that moment. I warmed up the engine and drove off, the two of them standing
arm-in-arm on the porch, popping up in my rear-view like some misty
coming-of-age movie.
Dad was a
mechanic, and had given the truck a thorough check-up. He was well-acquainted
with the damage that could be inflicted by the Alaskan Highway (what we call
the Alcan), and had also prepared a large box of emergency supplies. By the
second day, I had already made use of the spare fan belt and one of those epoxy
hypodermics that keeps a windshield from crawling toward Juneau like a
spiderweb.
By the
fourth day, the damage was mostly to my exhausted body (which had started out
sore to begin with, thanks to my Jamesean concerto). Lord knows, they had made
lots of improvements to the old road (and still were, judging by all the
construction delays), but there were still all those rollercoaster dips where
the permafrost had given out, and long stretches of gravel that pik-pokked
their way into my brain. I made a mental note to get some new shocks once I reached
a city.
A couple
hours past Teslin, Yukon, I was just enjoying my first glimpse of the Canadian
Rockies when my view was rudely drowned out by a bombardment of fog. And not
just any fog – freezing fog. As I slipped into the brief summer night, microscopic
ice crystals danced across my headlight beams, creating a fairyland aura that
was putting me right to sleep. I had sunk into the more desperate stages of
Auto Wakefulness Therapy – self-slapping, knee-knocking, the occasional Fay
Wray scream – when another set of fairies, orange and blinking, appeared on the
shoulder. Hazard lights on sawhorses, leading me into a rest area that said Watson Lake.
This was
the home of the Signpost Forest, something I had always thought of as an artful
myth. Back in World War II, the U.S. had some real concerns about Japan
attacking military outposts in Fairbanks and Anchorage, which were wholly
dependent on air and sea for the delivery of supplies. (The Japanese actually did make some attacks on the Aleutian
Islands in 1942.)
So they
sent 27,000 workers – 11,000 of them soldiers – to work on the Alcan, and they
built all 1500 miles in eight months, working non-stop in awful conditions. One
day, an Illinois soldier named Carl K. Lindley expressed his homesickness by
putting up a sign from his native state. There are now almost 50,000, from all
over the world, covering a grove of telephone poles just off the highway.
I know. I
sound like a freakin’ tour guide. But I was enjoying a free cup of coffee in
the interpretive center, and I’m a compulsive reader. When I finally wandered
outside, the freezing fog was snaking in and out of the signposts, which added
to its mythic qualities. I touched a few of them, just to make sure. The
variety was amazing. I found a single pole with signs from The Netherlands,
Manitoba, Michigan, Switzerland and Yorba Linda, California. I was running my
hand over a handmade sign from Bob and Mary Stetson of Texas when I heard
footsteps, and turned to find a striking young man headed my way.
“Hi,” he said.
“Have you decided on a destination?”
He was tall
and lean, a classic Jimmy Stewart type, with dark, intense eyes like Gregory
Peck (my whole senior year, I was on a classic-movies kick). In any case, he
had read my mind so precisely that I had to laugh.
“I’ve been
so occupied with getting out of Alaska, I hadn’t figured out where I was
getting out to. Where are you
headed?”
He smiled
mischievously. “Wherever my next ride takes me.”
“You’re
hitchhiking the Alcan? Are you insane?”
“My friends
seem to think so.”
“And here I
was thinking I was so reckless and brave.”
“You’re a
girl. You get extra credit.”
“Well
thanks.”
We stood
and talked for another hour, but it didn’t seem to matter what we said. We were
locked in a mutual study. He spoke in clear, careful sentences – almost like an
actor – and his voice was smooth and baritone, like a radio newsman. He had
thick, jet-black hair, with a single renegade hank that would slip over his
forehead when he laughed. He had a wide mouth, and generous lips that would
almost seem girly but for a small scar on his right upper that set things
fetchingly asymmetrical. When he told a story, he would insert little questions
so I could take part (“So then we headed for Prudhoe Bay – have you been
there?”).
In short,
he had all those gentleman qualities that I had always screened for in high
school, but he also seemed like a Boy Who Got Laid. This was a combination I
had never encountered. The attraction was so strong and natural that I had to
remind myself of the hard, external facts: strange
boy, middle of nowhere, traveling alone…
His name
was Harvey, which fit rather comically with the Jimmy Stewart vibe. Harvey
Lebeque, son of Cajuns who left New Orleans to work on the Alyeska pipeline.
His dad worked in maintenance, which meant constant travel, but also a comfy
existence for his family. That was the part that drove him out.
“People who
come from poor families, and then find themselves with money, they go all
security crazy!” he said. “If I had to listen to one more of my dad’s pep talks
about ‘doing the smart thing,’ I was going to have a freaking seizure. It’s my
theory that the only way you ever learn is by doing the stupid things. So here I am – ha-haah!”
He seemed
to save that laugh for things that really broke him up. The second syllable was
open and joyous, a touch of a James Brown shriek. Only an hour, and I already
knew that. Strange boy, middle of
nowhere. I also knew that the one thing he needed the most had remained
conspicuously absent from the conversation. I ran my hand along a license plate
from Montreal.
“How do you
rate as a driver, Harvey?”
“Four
years, no tickets, no accidents.”
“No car,” I
said, and laughed.
“No, I’ve
got a car. I left it in Fairbanks.”
“Wait a
minute. You’re hitchhiking by choice?”
“Stupid
things? Learning? Besides, I wanted to break out of my shell. I’ve always been
a little shy.”
“Shy?” I
said. “Talking to strange girls in sign forests?”
“I’m not
talking to strange girls. I’m talking to you.”
I was
desperately fighting off a blush. Perhaps it was cold enough that he wouldn’t
notice.
“Okay,” I
said. “Here’s the deal. You drive, I sleep. And none of this macho crap about
driving forever – you get tired, you let me know. And I’m reading you as a
gentleman, so I’m trusting you to stay that way.”
“Yes,
ma’am.”
“Can you
chip in for gas?”
“I can pay for gas. I’m stupid, not broke. In
fact, um…”
I don’t
know if he was trying to prove his previous statement, but this seemed to be
his shy side. He buried his hands in his jacket and looked groundward, like a
soldier delivering bad news to his commanding officer.
“I hope
you’ll take this the right way, but I already got a room at a hotel down the
street, and I would be more than happy to sleep on the floor if you would share
the room with me, because I’ve already paid for it, and because, frankly, you
look exhausted.”
“Oh,” I
said. This was getting trickier by the minute. I chewed on a thumbnail.
“Not to
discount your attractions, Channy,” he said. “But a hitchhiker can hardly
afford to lose a long-distance ride by making untoward advances. We can… buy
some jingle bells and string them around your bed. You can handcuff me to the
radiator. Provided… you have handcuffs.”
“Geez,
Harvey, I just…”
“Did I
mention that this room has a clawfoot bathtub? With hot running water?”
“Sold!”
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