Bond eyebrows a little pessimistically. “Well, keep us posted and stay in touch. Do some good, that’s all we can ask. And stay off Wall Street, Babylon.”
“Yes, Sir, I will. Thanks for everything. There’s a road out there somewhere.”
“All right, Babylon. It will find you.”
And the boy returned to Babylon, from whence he had come.
But now things get a little confessional. The wild side of life—including the mea culpa part—is always there waiting, and the boy was about to experience it in a way that would alter his path forever. He really was heading west.
Why the Boy Took the Car, the Big Argument, and the Journey West
Most boys who are honest and trustworthy have at least one big argument with their dads growing up. That doesn’t mean that they should seek it out, but if it finds them and involves defending their integrity, the confrontation must be accepted with courage. This doesn’t mean that dads are bad, or boys either. It’s just about growing up.
It was early July, and the boy was home in Babylon after graduation, thinking that college made no sense. One Saturday evening he drove out to Westhampton Beach, a seaside town filled with lively young people and quite a few St. Paul’s guys celebrating the end of school at a class graduation party. The boy felt so removed from the scene and the drinking that he walked away. It just seemed like such a waste of minds.
That evening did not find him struggling to escape from some dark valley of despair. But he saw no meaning in going to Swarthmore anymore, where he had in the end decided to go because it was supposedly more acceptable and East Coast than heading out west to Reed, where he had received an offer that he turned down.
After returning home late that night the boy was feeling claustrophobic, stuck on a too Long Island, and, thinking about his dream, determined that he just might journey to the west after all. Now, anyone who would follow a blue dream as though it were a direction sign is trusting the universe more than most, but the boy sort of wanted to do just that. He had no worldly goals, but he was open to surprises.
Anyway, St. Paul himself was always on the road, and so were Kerouac and Whitman, he thought. Sometimes that early July he would drive over to Huntington along the North Shore and stop at Whitman’s birthplace on Route 110, or to Northport, the next town over, to visit Gunther’s Tap Room where Kerouac spent years drinking heavily after he wrote On the Road. The boy would hang out there, ordering Cokes and asking the fishermen about Kerouac. Some remembered a guy jotting words down on napkins at a corner table while others just drew a blank. The bartender knew a lot about Kerouac and hung old news articles about him on the wall.
“After all,” said the bartender, “Kerouac coined the term ‘Beat Generation,’ so we give him most of the wall space on that side.”
It was heaven-sent that, in the middle of that July, the boy and his dad got into a fierce argument; otherwise he would never have had the audacity to follow the dream to the west in the way that he did. There had to be a push as well as a pull, and it really helps if the push is strong when the pull is as vague as a recurring dream. Why the argument? The boy had been offered a great summer job tutoring inner-city kids in the Bronx, building on his Millville experience. But his dad thought the location was dangerous. He said he’d had someone check it out, but the boy doubted it. The bottom line was that his folks did not have any sense for who the boy was, and anyway he was overshadowed by two superstar older siblings.
“It’s dangerous in the Bronx, and your mother is against it,” Dad said over his standard whiskey on the rocks. It was mostly Mom who’d pressured him to take a stand against the Bronx.
“Dad, this is something that I planned on and it means everything to me,” said the boy. “Rev. Welles pulled a few strings and set it up, and it is one thing I really want to do.”
“Look, you can’t do it. I won’t put up with it. That’s it. No further discussion.” The tone was terminal.
The boy managed a few words of defiance: “Look, folks, this just makes no sense. It confines me, and I am going to do this.”
“You will not,” said Mom, in a serious throaty tone, red lipstick covering her cigarette, martini in hand.
Dad stood up angrily and thundered, with all the strength of the WW II Navy Commander that he had been, “You are upsetting your mother!”
“I am not dropping this job, that’s it!” the boy repeated.
Then, Mom, having had her several drinks, and Dad too, raised the stakes. “I’m paying for Swarthmore, so either you drop this job or you’re paying on your own.”
He paused. “Okay, but I am not thinking of you as good parents. So what am I supposed to do this summer?”
“I can call Bill De Bono,” Dad said. “Bill’s got a lampshade factory. You can make lampshades in Patchogue.” At the time Dad was the VP of W&J Sloane’s Furniture Store on Fifth Avenue, so he knew a lot of people around New York who were in the lamp business.
“Oh, what the heck!” the boy relented. He had nothing against hard work, but it would be empty manual labor.
So now he had a job in Patchogue, a town about half an hour farther east, in Bill De Bono’s lampshade factory. The boy tried it for a couple of weeks. Old Bill, cigar in hand, stationed him on an assembly line, cutting cardboard forms between two large Italian women, Maria and Cassandra. These were hardworking, salt-of-the-earth women, and the boy got along with them okay; the boy got along with everyone. But the factory did not have air conditioning, so it was hot and sweaty and smelly. And with each passing day he became angrier and more ready to head off to greener pastures in a way that might just declare his total and complete emancipation from his parents’ influence forever and ever.
Dad still had that second-hand gray Mercedes 190 that he had bought to look good when he visited St. Paul’s. One hot, muggy Friday, two weeks into his factory job, the boy drove the 190 to the factory as usual and put in a solid day of hard labor. Then, that evening, he drove out to Westhampton again to spend a few days with friends—good old Livy, a buddy from St. Paul’s, and the boy’s nice blonde girlfriend Lee, whom he liked a lot because he could look into her eyes and see the universe as the waves were crashing into the dunes. The folks were okay with his borrowing the 190 because they could drive the other car. The next night, a Saturday, was the fateful night the boy finally decided to set out on an unspecified quest west.
That evening the boy sat on the bench pondering his favorite book, Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, about “Ultimate Reality” and dharma, and knew he was worried that everything he was doing was pointless and that at his dying breath he would be filled with regrets over a meaningless life. Putting aside his copy of Huxley, he pulled his heavily underlined copy of Hesse’s Siddhartha out of his backpack. It tells about a young man born into a rich family—a.k.a. the Buddha—who took to the road on a spiritual journey of self-discovery, seeking meaning and authenticity.
At eleven that night, feeling the need to resist the downward vortex of family life, he got into the Mercedes 190 and said goodbye to Lee and Livy without telling them anything about his plans. He just started driving west. He followed the Sunrise Highway (Route 27) to the Long Island Expressway (I-495). He drove through the Midtown Tunnel and up the FDR Drive and over the George Washington Bridge and just followed the signs for Route 80 West. He did not have a road map, but west is west, and the only other sign was for I-95 South. There was nothing about “south” in the dream.
Route
