Chapter 1 of “Gravel”

Mark was one of those guys who floated through life buoyed by his natural charm and likability. With bleach-blonde hair and steroid-swollen biceps, the overwhelming impression he gave was that of a gym-bro surfer, despite hailing from some small town in north Jersey. Jack had met him after a gig at one of those stately old Midtown hotels that had been the center of the socialite scene a century before, but whose cramped rooms were now full of tourists who hadn’t read the reviews and whose grand ballroom mostly hosted corporate events. They were both freelance cater-waiters who spent their time rushing around the ballroom during fundraising galas and company dinners. The venue kept the lights low to hide the peeling paint and water stains on the ceiling, but peering into the shadows long enough revealed that the hotel’s best days were long behind it.

Rumored to be the epicenter of midtown Manhattan’s bedbug epidemic, there was always a rush among the waiters to place their knapsacks and purses on the high shelves in the unused coat-check that served as storage for their personal items and a rendezvous point for amorous encounters or a quick bump to keep up one’s energy. Jack sometimes imagined the building, with its ornamented exterior and its chic-gone-shabby insides as an old knickerbocker, convalescing, but still full of stories.

One night, after a fundraiser, Jack had snatched up what he thought was his backpack and dashed down to the street, knowing that at 1 AM it might take him two hours to get back to his tiny apartment in the hinterlands of Brooklyn, as the trains ran sporadically at such a late hour. One of the main perks of living in the city was that Jack didn’t have to drive. Even with corrective lenses, a peculiar congenital astigmatism gave him terrible night blindness, clashing contrasts robbing his focus following just a short time at the wheel after dark. He’d once read that confederate soldiers called the condition “gravel,” and he wished the tough-sounding term had stuck.

He was rushing down the avenue when he heard someone yelling “Hey, Buddy!” behind him. After half a decade in the city Jack was inured to the shouts of the locals, as it was usually wise to not get caught up in the sort of drama that sometimes accompanied acknowledging strangers in the boroughs, and so he didn’t turn around.

It wasn’t until the voice yelled “You have my bag!” that he turned to see the good-looking blonde guy he’d been working alongside, but didn’t know, running at a fast clip towards him carrying a backpack identical to the one he was wearing. Embarrassed, Jack apologized, but Mark laughed it off, complimenting Jack’s taste in baggage and offering the cryptic words, “You’d’ve been in for a hell of a surprise when you got home.”

Mark, energetic despite the late hour and long shift, then suggested that they grab a drink. Jack surprised himself by saying yes, finding something magnetic about the buff, blue-eyed man of indeterminable age. They hopped into a cab that Mark offered to pay for, and Jack soon found himself at a crowded bar downtown where they drank until last call at 4 AM. So began their friendship.

Over the next few years Jack and Mark would see each other at events often, frequently drinking until the early hours of the morning once the guests had gone home and all the plates and flatware were collected. This was good for Jack, whose growing depression had found him in a cycle of working, sleeping, and wasting hours watching tv, often downing beers alone. Sometimes he’d open his laptop and stare at a blank page for a while, but he hadn’t actually written anything in ages. It would have been easy for Jack to be jealous of Mark, who’d flirt with bartenders and drunk girls, and who usually wore a tank top under his leather jacket, which he’d shed to show off his muscles as soon as they entered the dive-bars he preferred, but he was so likable it was hard to engender any negative feelings toward him.

Sometimes, after a few beers, Jack would rib Mark about his untrained legs, which were no bigger than his own. “Girls don’t care about legs,” Mark would inevitably reply, his spokesmodel grin wide above his glass of bourbon on the rocks. Mark would encourage Jack to join a gym, which he never did, and on occasion would point to a woman across the room and suggest Jack chat her up. He sometimes would, but was bad at what Mark called “sealing the deal.” Each time, Mark would whisper “visualize success” in his ear, sounding like an infomercial life coach. Jack never succeeded.

He had moved to the city with dreams of writing The Great American Novel. Corny as it might seem, he thought that living among the rabble would give him the perspective he needed to tell the story of the country he lived in, but couldn’t quite understand. Jack had decided to work dead-end jobs until his first novel, written as a final project during his senior year at a community college in Maine, was reviewed in The New York Times. Sharktown, about a series of murders happening in a tourist hotspot during a summer terrorized by a string of shark attacks, had been printed out and shipped to a dozen publishers his first week in the city. The twist where the shark scientist was leading the shark cult behind the murders and the shark attacks was so fresh, Jack felt it couldn’t fail.

He had been aiming for Stephen King meets Peter Benchley, but each rejection letter solidified his concerns he’d that he had missed the mark. Each rejection letter erased a bit of his confidence until he couldn’t distinguish between himself and the blank pages he often fruitlessly stared at. Eventually, his dream dissipated without him even really noticing. All those rejections were stacked up like a wall between the praise that had been heaped on him since middle school. He became painfully aware that he was not as talented as he had been led to believe and, the night he met Mark, Jack hadn’t written anything in over three years. That didn’t change during the course of their friendship.

Common wisdom suggested “write what you know,” but as time wore on, Jack had begun to believe that nothing he knew was worth writing about. He felt like he hadn’t had enough interesting experiences to write anything anyone would care to read. His upbringing in New England had been comfortable, but boring. Few exciting things that he could remember had happened there. One summer a shark had bitten a swimmer’s leg at the beach across the street from The Edge, a surfer bar/cafe where Jack had washed dishes while in high school.

The day of the shark attack, Jack had stood at the edge of the building with his best friend Worm, who had gotten him the job, and watched the shark-bitten guy getting loaded into an ambulance, screaming like a banshee with his wailing wife and children nearby, not realizing at the time that the seeds of a novel were being sown in his mind. Worm was two years older but in the same grade, having been held back twice in elementary school, much to the chagrin of his father, Leroy, a retired Air Force officer with high expectations for a family that had consistently let him down. Leroy had snapped one day, destroying every piece of furniture in the house and smashing every object with an axe, then threatened his family with a gun, before finally shooting himself in the head while they watched, something Jack felt personally responsible for. The genesis of that guilt would blossom into the depression that now gripped him.

Jack and Worm would get high in the clamshell parking lot behind The Edge and then talk about their grand plans while scrubbing wing sauce and crusty nachos off of plates in front of the huge stainless steel sink in the back, drenching each other, but not really caring, because the kitchen got so hot.

Even teachers called Jacques Wormer, “Worm,” as using his given name was apt to cause a fight. His mother was a bipolar French Canadian Leroy had met at an airbase in Ontario. Jack knew she’d get manic and rack up thousands in credit card debt, or become depressed and refuse to speak anything but French for months. During these times Worm’s younger sister, Angelique, would take time away from her hellraising ways and act as an interpreter for the family, as Worm pretended to speak only English and what he claimed was decent conversational Japanese, and Leroy had never been of any help.

Jack’s life in the city had become one of quiet desperation, working endless hours just to be able to afford his exorbitant rent, which went up every time he renewed his lease. Jack enjoyed his time with Mark, but did not relish the inevitable hangovers that followed. One day, as he was withdrawing a single bill from the only ATM in his neighborhood that dispensed tens, a homeless man sheltering from the cold in the vestibule said, apropos of nothing, “This town is eating you alive.” Jack decided to move back home. Three days later he was back in Maine.

He could smell, but not see the ocean from his parents house, which was where he had grown up. Jack had been vague in his explanation to them as to why he hadn’t renewed his lease, citing safety concerns. This went down smoothly with his mom and dad, who thought that even Bangor was too hectic and dangerous to visit more than once every few years. Weighing his options, he realized he wasn’t in terrible shape financially. With his security deposit returned and his final paychecks to still arrive, he had a cushion that would last a few months.

Drinking a cup of coffee on the porch one morning, Jack realized he hadn’t even been honest with himself regarding his motivations for coming home. The dream residing in the back of his head was that he’d abscond up to the cabin up near the Canadian border his parents owned for a couple of months and actually write The Great American Novel, or some approximation of it. He thought that up there in the woods he might find the clarity required for such a task, or at least the confidence to believe he could.

Jack resolved to find something within that he knew was worth writing about, something that made a tale worth telling. He’d lived in the city long enough to have some stories, and he had seen some of the country. As a kid his parents had packed him into a motorhome and driven him out west to see The Grand Canyon one summer. They’d stopped at all the spots one would expect, from Gettysburg to Carlsbad Caverns, through The Salton Sea to the Pacific Ocean. He remembered standing in four states at one and how cold it was in the climate-controlled building that had been built surrounding Lincoln’s childhood home.

More than that, he remembered the long hours of looking out the window watching the American landscape pass by. Far from the New England woods he was familiar with were seemingly endless miles of crops stretching out to the horizon. He saw people existing in conditions unimaginable to him, citizens of his country living in tin shacks that looked more like the homes of desperately poor African villagers he’d seen on tv than anything resembling the way he and his peers lived. He saw people, bent at the waist, working in the fields, evoking images of the past depicted in his schoolbooks from times before war and technology had freed Americans from such toil, or so he had been taught.

It dawned on him that he was seeing The Breadbasket of America, former home of The Dustbowl, but it wasn’t until he saw the gigantic machines moving through the fields that the importance truly sunk in. People working by hand was something he could wrap his mind around, but the giant threshers or whatever they were, towering over the fields made him realize the scale of things. All those people he saw rushing around in the backgrounds of news reports in New York and Los Angeles, were being fed by what he saw before him. Every box of cornflakes and every slice of wonderbread started here, eventually filtering out to feed the hungry mouths of America.

More than one campground Jack’s family had stopped at was on native land. At one place men in traditional garb had come out and danced for the gaggle of assembled travelers and tourists, most of whom had just stopped because it was the cheapest place to stay in the county. Jack had thought it odd when one of the headdressed men had said that people were free to videotape, but to please not take any photographs.

The men who danced had a seriousness to them that suffused into the crowd. Jack felt privileged to be there, privy to a culture that he’d never seen featured on television, only in the old issues of National Geographic that his grandfather kept on long shelves in the basement. Some of those yellow-spined magazines featured naked people, but Jack didn’t find them titillating in the same way the naked people in a pile of magazines he had once found in the woods had made him feel. The suspicious gazes of the bare-breasted women on the pages made him feel like an interloper on a world he was never meant to see, that people like him had intruded upon in pursuit of some spectacle.

He didn’t feel dirty like that the night the men had danced and chanted until he looked past the dancers, pounding out percussive steps in rows, to the others, the ones not dancing, who stood next to the pickup trucks whose headlights illuminated the whole scene. A few men wearing baseball caps or cowboy hats stood smoking by the vehicles. They mostly looked impatient, but Jack could also detect some mixture of emotions he could not identify. They looked disappointed, like the way Mrs. Grither did in 7th grade, when she thought he’d plagiarized his paper. He wondered what life must be like, out under those wide open skies, far from the ocean.

On the porch, sipping his coffee with the salt smell of the sea on the breeze, Jack wondered if he had something worth saying. Maybe he could talk about how one of those cowboy hats had been passed around the crowd afterwards and wound up brimming with bills. Jack wondered if that said something about something and thought that a couple months up in the mountains might let him figure that out. All he knew was that this time there would be no shark scientist.

He was debating whether or not The Great American novel should include a love story, and was thinking about Ahab’s wife when he got a text. “Konichiwa! herd ur back in town?” it read. It was from Worm. Jack felt a mixture of emotions. He considered not responding before deciding that a trip down memory lane might help get his long-dormant creative juices flowing again, and agreed to meet at The Edge that afternoon.

Tinkering around the house during the intervening hours left Jack feeling out of sorts. He decided to crystallize his vague plan to go write up in the mountains by telling Worm that was why he had come home. He was going to write a novel, he just hoped no one asked what it was about. Eventually, he made his way to what passed for a downtown, just a couple of blocks of businesses across the road from the beach.

Jack passed the surf shop. One time he’d been inside talking to the owner when Angelique, who had started to go by “Angel” after her dad died, had walked in, pulled a boogie board off the wall, and walked out without a word. Everyone saw, but before the police could be called, Jack paid for the board, though out of an obligation to his friend, or the nagging guilt he carried everywhere, he couldn’t tell. He had never told Worm. Jack saw that the childrens’ clothing store had been transformed into a vape shop in his absence, but the same old woman was still sitting in the same spot she always did in the Chinese restaurant next door.

At the end of the stretch of buildings, next to a sandy vacant lot was The Edge. Jack popped in and immediately saw Worm sitting alone at the bar. A couple of families with children were seated in the main dining area, but it was early enough that Worm was the only one drinking. Jack made eye contact with a baby in a high chair and it screamed.

Jack approached the bar and saw that Worm did not look good. His eyes were rheumy and he had the mushy appearance of a person who spent too much time with a drink in their hand. “Jack!” he cried, rising from his stool and grabbing Jack in an embrace. A sickly sweet smell enveloped them both and he took a deep, shuddering breath after being released. Jack took a seat and ordered a beer, despite the hour. As the bartender, a harried looking woman who was evidently the only person working front of house, poured his drink, Worm addressed her. Jack knew he had let himself go a little, but hoped he wasn’t in the same ballpark as his friend, who seemed sick.

“Felicia, you remember Jack, right?” said Worm. Jack took a closer look at the woman and recognized her as having been a senior when he and Worm were freshman. She’d been the captain of the cheerleading squad, but despite her popularity, had always been kind to even them. Jack remembered the slight crush he had harbored for her back in those days.

“Hi, Jack,” she smiled at him, her eyes flashing an indication of frustration familiar to anyone who knew Worm.

“Jack moved to New York City to be a gigolo,” said Worm, exhibiting his penchant for stirring up trouble simply for his own entertainment.

“Oh yeah?” said Felicia, placing a frothy pint on the counter in front of Jack, who blushed. He’d been famously shy as a kid, not when it came to derring-do triple-dog-dares, as he was always the first one into an abandoned bomb shelter, cave, or supposedly haunted house, but he’d struggled with girls. Felicia served as a reminder of who he used to be. Jack wondered what Mark would have to say.

“Yeah,” said Worm, draining his glass, “but the problem was that he left the ladies more depressed than when he found them and they all asked for their money back.” Felicia smiled at that and turned her attention to Jack.

“I remember those stories you used to write for the school literary magazine,” she said, “They were really depressing.”

Jack was trying to think of a response when she was summoned by the family dining behind him, and excused herself. After Felicia was out of earshot, Worm said, “Gonna shoot your shot with her?”

Jack blushed again, but before he could offer a response, Worm spoke. “If you do, I won’t tell Angel.”

Jack asked why Angel would care and Worm stared at him with disbelief. After several seconds, Jack asked “What?” with some measure of annoyance.

“Angelique has been in love with you since we were kids,” said Worm, without a hint of humor or irony.

A flood of memories began to fill Jack’s head. Worm continued to speak, but Jack’s mind swam with disorientation as he relived past moments in time with a new perspective. He thought about all the photographs of birthdays and beach outings where Angel is pressed up against him. How had he never noticed? The night of his going away party the whole gang had gathered at the beach. In the picture of them all crowded onto the lifeguard’s chair. She chose to sit on his lap.

“Remember the summer your parents took you out west?” asked Worm. Jack nodded, not wanting to change the subject. He’d always thought Angel was cute, but never considered her in that way, she was Worm’s little sister, after all. She was fun at times, but he remembered being scared of her as well. Angel was impulsive and unpredictable enough that she’d spent some time at a school for kids with behavioral issues.

“She’s been in love with you since you sent her that stupid squished penny. Boy, that was a fucked up day.” Jack’s mind flew through time and space to Utah, almost two decades ago. His dad had pulled the motorhome over at a teddy bear museum, as it was the only attraction for miles and signs on the highway leading up to it advertised “Hot Coffee.” Jack’s family had been surprised to see that it was just a regular house and the museum staff were just the old man and woman who lived there.

The “exhibits” were merely teddy bears on shelves in their home, but if the old man, who identified himself as the “director/docent” was to be believed, many of the examples on display were highly coveted or of immense historical value. The old woman disappeared and returned with three mugs of black coffee that were almost cool enough to drink by the end of the tour. She handed Jack his without a glance at his parents or any question of his age. Adding to the surrealness of the whole affair was a “gift shop,” featuring postcards and miniature teddy bears. Next to the door was a display featuring a variety of anti-Mormon pamphlets.

Between them was one of those crank machines that accepts two quarters and a penny, then flattens the cent and embosses it with an image and some text. As his parents were still sipping their coffee and politely declining an invitation to attend a church service, Jack cranked a penny into a flat, oblong plate. Afterwards, looking at the stamped bear and words “Teddy Bear Museum, Sometown, Utah” he wished he’d saved the quarters for a claw machine down the road.

He bought a postcard that said “LDS Leads to Hell!” with flames on it to send to Worm, because it seemed edgy, though he didn’t really understand what it meant. Later, filling out the whole back as the motorhome bounced along he wrote “One of the bears looked just like Leroy,” not thinking that postcards could be read by anyone, with no conception of how even a child’s indiscretion could ignite a powderkeg of rage in a man who had simmered for too long. When he was done he dug the flat penny out of his pocket and taped it next to his signature, squishing “4 Angelique”into the limited space remaining.

“Worm, I am so sorry,” Jack said, adding, “You know, for years I thought it was the crack about the bear that set him off.”

“How could you know he was raised Mormon?” asked Worm, draining his beer, “We barely knew. It was like just a footnote to my dad. He never brought it up. No one could have guessed that postcard would have made him snap, except maybe my mom.” They sat a moment in silence, but before Jack could apologize again, Worm said, “That penny was the first nice thing anyone had done for her without expecting something in return in a long time. Don’t be sorry. That was a sweet thing you did. She still has it, y’know. It’s on her keychain.”

Jack’s mind was still swirling, bouncing between the week at school without Worm at the beginning of the next year. The Wormers had gone to Canada and it had been suggested that they wouldn’t return. They had though, and he remembered Angel, as a sophomore, asking him if he had a date to the senior prom. The look of disappointment on her face when he had scoffed at the idea took on a new meaning in his memory. Thinking back, it had been the night of the prom that she’d pulled up to The Edge in a black Range Rover and asked him if he had wanted to go for a drive up to the cabin.

Jack had done some shots as he worked alone that night, and said “yes,” without really considering the two hour drive or whether or not Angel was even old enough to have a license. He accepted her explanation that she’d borrowed the huge, sleek SUV from a friend’s dad and started the drive into the mountains with Nirvana playing. She drove with urgency, way too fast for Jack’s comfort, especially as the sun went down and the wooded landscape and brightly lit road began to affect his vision. It was no surprise when a cop pulled out behind them. It was a surprise when Angel told him the car was stolen.

After they saw two more sets of lights behind them in the distance, Angel accelerated around a blind curve, going so fast Jack thought they were going to tip over, then shot up a nearly hidden gravelly logging road where she turned off the headlights. They turned and watched one set of flashers pass, then two more. As they sat there in darkness, she explained that she’d been joyriding since she was nine and had never been caught, always returning the vehicle as if undisturbed a matter of hours later. She just liked driving, especially at night, she said, it let her clear her head.

Fifteen nerve wracking, nearly silent minutes later, she pulled back onto the road and took them home. After that, Jack hadn’t seen much of Angel until the night they posed together on the lifeguard chair four years later. She always seemed to have an excuse to leave when Jack came around and he never thought much about it, at least dimly aware of the demons she must wrestle with.

Jack began to say something, but Worm cut him off, summoning Felicia for another round. Before he knew it, Jack was drunk and it was dark. He was wondering aloud how he was going to get home when Worm slurred, “Don’t worry, she’s here.” Jack recalled Worm speaking French into his phone earlier, and turned just in time to see Angel take the stool next to him. She looked beautiful and hard-nosed, like Jack supposed she always had. He noticed that her grim, don’t-fuck-with-me look softened when she saw him, which tangled his tongue, so he remained quietly in the middle while the Wormers talked. He had more beers, but Angel drank only soda water with lemon, saying something about being “California Sober” and preferring psychedelics these days.

Some time passed in a haze and Jack remembered hugging Worm goodbye and how Felicia had written her number on the check, but he couldn’t remember how he ended up on the lifeguard chair with Angel, just the two of them on the beach with the dim after-hours lights of the street at their back and a fisherman’s fire burning in the sand in the distance. They weren’t speaking, just sitting close, each with one earbud in, listening to Nirvana. Late as it was, when his phone rang Jack assumed it was his mother, despite the text he’d sent assuring her he had a ride home. It was Mark.

“Heyyyyyyyy, Buddy,” said the familiar voice on the phone, “I heard you’re up in Maine.”

“Uh-yuh,” replied Jack, in the manner of Mainers.

“Could you be in Boston by tomorrow morning?” asked Mark.

“Uh-yuh,” said Jack, checking the time and doubting he had the heart for whatever Mark was apt to ask next.

“Okay, Buddy, here’s what I’m gonna need you to do. There’s a garage in Southie, I’m gonna text you the address and door code. Inside is a heavily modified 1969 Mustang. The keys are on the tire and there’s $10,000 cash in the glove box. The trunk’s welded shut, so you can’t bring much. You can bring one person to split the driving with, because this car absolutely has to be in California by Sunday morning. You cannot, and I cannot stress this enough, cannot, get pulled over for any reason. I will text you the coordinates in The Salton Sea where you need to be. Think you’re up for this, Buddy?” Before Jack could answer, Mark spoke again. “You don’t have to decide now,” he said. Jack heaved a sigh of relief, wanting to talk to his parents, and recognizing just how drunk he was. “Call me back in 5,” said Mark, and hung up.

Jack sat on the lifeguard chair in shock, sobered by the call. It was an absurd idea and he was in no shape for anything like it. Everything was too rushed and seemingly dangerous. It was foolish to even consider. He suddenly remembered he wasn’t alone and turned to see Angel, one side of her face illuminated by the distant streetlight next to The Edge, and the other, facing the ocean, thrust into darkness. With the earbud in, she had heard the whole conversation.

Angel held out her phone, displaying a map with a thick blue line carved across the US. “If we leave now, we might have time to stop at The Teddy Bear Museum. It’s still there, I checked.” She was dangling her keys off one finger. Jack saw the squished penny flashing in the light.