Attended noon Mass in Beaumont (childhood home of Johnny Winter) with Doreen Badeaux of the Apostleship of the Sea, the Catholic mariners’ group operating out of Port Arthur (childhood home of Janis Joplin.)

On my kitchen wall back in Baltimore (a sacred place of broken rosaries and dishes drying on the sink, a spot where I would spend almost no time over a heavily-traveled 2008), I have a framed photograph of Johnny and Janis sharing a microphone at Madison Square Garden in 1969.

St. Anthony Basilica, Beaumont, Texas

Mass was at St. Anthony’s Cathedral Basilica on Jefferson Street downtown on, a 1903 building of dark red brick reminiscent of Our Lady of Pompei on Conkling Street in southeast Baltimore. Records there list the first Roman Catholic baptism in Beaumont on June 6, 1875.

After Mass there was cake and coffee in the parish hall. I had a plate and a cup and quietly slipped out. Behind the wheel, I hit Interstate 10 east for the Pelican State.

In Travels With Charley, which I assigned to my daughter Amelia to read when she was 11 (and which she loathed, only to encounter it again at NYU), Steinbeck reports packing “… tools for emergency, tow lines, a small block and tackle, a trenching tool and crowbar, tools for making and fixing and improvising …”

Along with emergency food and water to last a week, the pragmatic list reminded me of how my father might prepare for a 10,000 mile road trip if Dad had done his traveling by automobile instead of ship.

Steinbeck’s next paragraph better describes my overland approach since inaugurating annual road trips of 1,000 miles or more since taking the kids to Memphis and Mississippi in 1989.

“I took paper, carbon, typewriter, pencils, notebooks,” wrote Steinbeck in the 1962 classic which – along with that year’s controversial Nobel Prize for Literature – revived the author’s career near the end of his life.

Reporters retracing Steinbeck’s route and comparing the text to unpublished material, primarily Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, found large passages of fiction. I was disappointed in what had become of the genius behind The Grapes of Wrath but had no problem believing that he packed “… dictionaries, a compact encyclopedia and a dozen other reference books, heavy ones. I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.”

I once traveled with portable typewriter (the kind sportswriters used in the 1930s, it bolted flush into a square black suitcase) that I bought on the sidewalk across from the old Seafarers International Union hall on East Baltimore Street and Central Avenue.

I had it tuned-up from time to time at Ken & Ray office machines on North Avenue before white kids not addicted to heroin thought it suave to be on North Avenue, before laptops made filing stories easy and nostalgia ridiculous.

Steinbeck had a French poodle named Charley in a spanking new, 1960, 305 cubic inch V6 GMC truck – which in honor of Cervantes he called Rocinante. It had a camper on the back which apparently he did not stay in as often as the book implies.

I cruised alone in a 2006 Toyota Tacoma pick-up – El Caballo Blanco – with a sleeping bag, a jar of peanut butter and Bolano’s 2666 as a shield against a landscape of lesser narratives. Because my own lesser narratives had not brought me the royalties that Steinbeck enjoyed, I spent nine out of every 10 days sleeping in the truck.

And in 1986 – from the Great Lakes to the Berkeley hills– a bad-boy named Bartoli was accompanied and tormented by his 19-year-old Irish-American girlfriend in a Bali green Karmann Ghia.

He paid $450 for the ’74 hardtop – the fenders built up out of Bondo putty and chicken wire – from “Pete the Mexican” near the Cabrini Green housing projects.

“Pete called weed ‘the effect,’” laughed Bartoli. “He’d say, ‘Have you had any of the effect today, college boy?”

A goulash of sundry effects and the grace of a God of which neither was aware delivered Bartoli and his willing hostage safely to Southern California.

“We were loaded down with five dozen tuna sandwiches, some Blue Thunder speed, a gallon of dago red wine and unfiltered Camels,” remembered Bartoli, a poet who best contemplates the world from the bleachers at Camden Yards. “Most of the sandwiches were gone by Nebraska.”

In the high altitude of Cheyenne, the Ghia sputtered and lost power. It also had no starter. The Cornhusker town of Kozad brought torrential downpours while Bartoli went nose-and-nose with tractor trailers.

“We rolled that fucker down hills to pop the clutch like a German luge,” he said. “From Mishawaka to Winnemucca to Lovelock …”

“Rocinante,” the camper truck Steinbeck drove during “Travels With Charley.”

Bartoli survived the journey and more foolhardy ones that followed until washing up on saner shores. He has since matured enough to take a good look at the copy of Travels with Charley on his Baltimore bookshelf; has survived enough without being able to take credit for it to feel kinship with the author, a man old before his time when he crossed the country with a poodle at age 58.

“Steinbeck was an alkie of the highest degree and Charley is tinged with sadness. I’ve often wondered whether those travels were really binges …”

Here is the poem Bartoli wrote about his binge in the Bali green Ghia.

ENGINES / 1986
I.
Driving 81 North through scrub pines and roadkill
I remember Torquato died of black lung.
Shenandoah’s purple shoulders release us
and I see him walking a cold road
to the mines at dawn.

Anne smokes a Camel in the front seat
of a bali green Karmann Ghia
Chandeliers float across a pool
in the wreckage of Colin’s wedding.
Without turn signals, brakes or insurance
we were blessed with air-cooled German technology.
A sparrow hawk opens the gates of Cumberland
and my blood speeds through the Alleghenies
like deer in the wake of shotgun fire.
My mother believes the Iriquois still live here,
spared by the maw of anthracite Gods,
concealed in mountains.
Pennsylvania is prettier in the rain.

We met at a soiree’ in Lake Forest.
I can only see freeway when I close my eyes.
Ohio’s white bough leaves a trail of skidmarks,
dead gophers, rabbits, hot rubber and glass on asphalt.

We started in on the 60 tuna sandwiches
made from an industrial-size can lifted
from the pantry of her sorority house.
The raceway through Angola and Gary slices
Mom’s polluted apple pie.
Holsteins hide their stillbirths in the grass.
I never eat the gravy at truck stops.

II.

Ghia rips through the haze of Joliet,
Moline, P-freakin-oria and the Mississippi
splits between Blackhawk and Shawnee;
Deputy Foster cites me in Des Moines
for duct tape on the back light
scrambling for Omaha and shuteye
as truckers compete for gash
on channel 19 seeking
some type of adhesive glued like bugs
to the beaver capitol of America.
My dead starter clicks to a hollow ignition,
thick rain outside of Lincoln,
“days like this tailor made for fucking”
said grandma Lorene, but there is something
obscene about making love in a Motel Six.

Slogging through Nebraska red rain
the road thin, the sky as wide as the mouth
of a screaming Indian.

Heifers wait it out all the way to Winnemucca,
auctioneer on the radio spitting “angus, angus.”
Truckers blanket my windshield with water,
edge me onto the shoulder, a gray mushroom cloud
in the rearview instills the need for quickness.

The green luge sputters into Medicine Bow,
then Cheyenne.

III.

Thin air chokes us on the high plains.
Commanches load quivers.
A string of hotels rest on ledges
under a crystalline Laramie sky.
Several thousand feet up, the engine gasps
and falters outside the Sunshine Trailer Park.
We finish off the tuna and watch
highway renovation crews drill their lives
into the shale of Rock Springs Canyon;
teepees set up for hard labor.
I trade blue thunder for tobacco
with a trucker from Stevens Point, Wisconsin.

She tells me she’s leaving for Spain
when the leaves turn again.
The lonely freight of the Union Pacific
moves in the heat with austerity.

Ghia glides into Salt Lake City.
You can taste the salt air for 50 miles
down a sodium drag strip which plays no favorites
with corroded hotels and deserted gas stations.
Ry Cooder ripples from a roadhouse.
A severed cow’s head dissipates on the horizon.
I can’t change her mind.

IV.

Dust in the eyes of Nevada nothingness;
just a test of the emergency detonation system.
I crush the Camels and drink water.
Desolate bells ring in the casino;
resurrected heads of tumbleweed leap out
stunting the roll of the tire.
Nothing lives very long here:
High beams, low beams, tumbleweed.

During a push start in Lovelock,
the sky fills with coyote teeth.
The car reeks of week-old tuna fish.
The moon is a coin in the slot.
Whatever died here was not buried deep enough.

Somewhere south of Truckee,
cadmium lakes and Redwoods usher us
into the West between the rock-faced chests of giants.
Christened under eucalyptus, my skin turned a Maidu color
I killed fish with a spear, sprinted through juniper fields
and fashioned necklaces of abalone.

The beauty of a California jay on the shoulder stuns me
but the Sacramento rush hour is no different
than any other you’ve seen.
Heading toward Golden Gate;
gulls like B-52s comb the water.
& the sun lays a sheet of copper below the fog.

What’s thrown away will come back to haunt
like a stiff joint in the low palm
flicked between the jetties.

Torquato is walking home along the horizon,
his face smeared in ash.
What is lost makes me burn more evenly.

Bartoli was long off the Blue Thunder and dago red in January of 2008 as I pushed toward Baltimore in the first of many ’08 cross-country trips. While I was in Louisiana and he was telling lying, cheating and stealing in Beijing, which he claims as his nature, the truth from which he’s been able to give more than he takes.

“I had traveled the world, had achieved some level of success but was leading a soulless existence,” he said. “I had it all and I had nothing. I was dying.”

Late Sunday night – 01.20.08 after 240 miles from Port Arthur to LaPlace, Louisiana – I pulled into a big-ass shopping mall parking lot. Propped up on pillows in the back of the truck, my mattress a layer-cake of comforters and blankets, my blanket a sleeping bag.

What Bartoli’s Ghia would look like if he still had it.

After grace, she stared at the battleship gray concrete floor and said no one had ever asked her what her favorite meal was much less make it for her. My parents have been making special meals for me and my brothers – birthdays, Sunday afternoons random weeknights – all of our lives.

It doesn’t seem like such a big deal when you grow up with it. At least until you see your folks getting too old to haul the pots around anymore. She had known none of this and cried at the table.

The phone rang as late January rain whipped inland from Ponchatrain splattered the camper cap in LaPlace, where Kid Ory was born a hundred years before Bartoli’s Ghia adventure.

Pork Chop Girl and I made small talk about life in Crabtown (a Howard County man was being held for assault with a gun and a frying pan) – before I asked, “Have you ever read La Noche Oscura del Alma by St. John of the Cross.”

I was hoping she might lay a few deep cuts from the Best of St. John of the Cross on me.

“No,” she says. “But St. Teresa [Avila, not Lisieux, a companera of the mystic who wrote Dark Night] has wanted me to for ages.”

New Orleans is 30 miles and one good night’s sleep away.

Photos: Macon Street Books

Me: “Hello from the hometown of Davy Crockett – Ozona, Texas. I’m writing an essay about the greatest seafaring movies of all time at the Ozona public library.”

Her: “Well that sounds . . . I don’t know how it sounds.”

Me: “It’s a nice life, wandering around, meeting people, writing what I want. I haven’t had to rent a hotel room yet. The Tacoma is really comfy with pillows and sleeping bag. Enough room to stretch out.”

Her: “Send greetings to the Ditzells.”

Me: “Will do.”

I spent the day visiting the Ditzells, who in a year would become my Amelia’s Lone Star sister-in-law and brother-in-law. As my Mom likes to say about folks for whom she has respect and affection: “Good people.”

Marcie Champion and husband Sam Ditzell live in Austin, often called the Third Coast, the Texas state capital and home to the LBJ Library, where the pens Lyndon used to enact civil rights legislation are on display.

It’s the town of where – over several months in 1968 – the great Johnny Winter recorded a live album at the Vulcan Gas Company at 316 Congress Avenue before the world found him. The population of Austin was less than 400,000 when Johnny made that record. It is just about 800,000 now.

The city has boomed several times in the past 40 years and as a consequence a lot of what used-to-be, both physically and spiritually, is gone.

“Believe it or not,” said Baltimore blues guitarist Pete Kanaras, keeping an eye on things back home on Macon Street as I criss-crossed the continent. “I have never played in the city that changed my life.”

These are the comforts of home, the opposite of the nomadic sojourn: indoor plumbing, refrigeration, a couch for napping in the sunshine; the ability to unpack all of your shit, spread it out on the floor and decide what is necessary for the next leg of the journey (what to wash, what to stuff in the back of the truck, what to shit can) and what is not.

All of the above are available on the road, of course – McDonald’s for bathrooms and coffee; the mattress and sleeping bag in the bed of my pick-up to sleep for free on parking lots; roadside picnic tables to go through one’s stuff while making a peanut sandwich; Laundromats crowded with more kids than a nursery school on the bad side of town.

But everything under one roof, where you can lock the front door and go about your business – walk in circles if you like, scratching your ass – that’s comfort, however un-poetic, and that’s what I got at Sam and Marci’s, the walls of their home hung with front pages of the 20th century’s landmark events.

Janis and Danko on the Festival Express

After my daily nap, I got a massage at Sam’s health club (thousands of miles behind the wheel, the body molding itself into stiff ropes of tension and pain) and joined the Ditzells for dinner at an Asian fusion restaurant downtown.

The food was very good, but the sort of place that didn’t exist when Stevie Ray Vaughn was honing his Hendrix meets the Alamo act at dives like the One Knife, music that would move fans to erect a statue of Vaughn near downtown a few years after his 1990 death in a helicopter crash.

Cruising by statues and reading the inscriptions – “Be sure you are right, then go ahead . . .” is chiseled on the Crockett statue on the Ozona town square – is often easier than accepting hospitality, however sincerely offered.

Unless it is an emergency or the destination is sacred, like the visits I have made over the years to my Aunt Dolores [born in Baltimore, 1929, in the city of Nelson Algren since the mid-1950s] – both timing and personalities have to be in sync to dock at an oasis.

If you have miles to cover and making good time (the coffee has kicked in just right; Dion singing about Elvis and Jesus; the sun or the moon is lighting the road in a way that draws you down the line) the person who lives beyond the passing highway sign has to be awfully special for you to stop.

[I like pulling over to take photos of highway signs for towns with the same names as friends or loved ones: Amelia, Louisiana; Norman, Oklahoma; Anna, Ohio.]

Other times you are dead tired, perhaps there is already 600 miles between you and the place you left at dawn. The folks that would let you stay a night or two are not bad people – neither mean nor stupid or especially boring – they are just people you’d rather not see.
This usually happens at places you’ve stayed once before and couldn’t wait to get back on the road. So you keep driving, droopy eyes peeled for the Golden Arches.

Port Arthur, home to my motorcycle riding, seafaring Roman Catholic priest friend Sinclair Oubre, is a natural gas and oil town. It’s most famous native daughter – Janis Joplin – once distinguished Port Arthur from Beaumont, the hometown of fellow blues shouter Johnny Winter, like this.
“Port Arthur is the asshole of the world,” Janis reportedly told a reporter. “And Beaumont is 20 miles up it!”

[Wanna see Janis warbling a drunken sing-along with Rick Danko to the old prison chant “Ain’t No More Cane?” Rent the documentary “Festival Express,” a Woodstock on rails.

Wanna hear a funny story about the house where Janis lived from the time when she was a junior Girl Scout to the year she dropped out of college? Keep reading.]

Poster for Johnny Winter show at Vulcan Gas Company

[In 1974, at the height of his pop stardom in the wake of the monster hit “Frankenstein,” Edgar was my first concert. I saw him at the old Baltimore Civic Center. A local band called Appaloosa opened the show. At the Gulf Coast Museum, I simply said “Thank you.”]

Janis’ birthday fell on a Saturday and I went to her childhood home – 4330 32nd Street – that afternoon. There, I saw the historical marker (once the ugly duckling persona non grata in her own backyard, the years, and tourist dollars, have softened attitudes) and I met the family who unwittingly bought the house of a legend.

“I lived next door for 21 years,” said Almu Cantu, standing with others in the front yard. “Her Mom and Dad were my neighbors for years after Janis died. People from as far away as Brazil would come and knock on my door and say, ‘I guess you know why we`re here.’”

Janis loved the arts, was devoted painting and spent time in the garage – a makeshift art studio – running the clothes dryer to keep warm. Her initials – or maybe her first name and hand print – are said to be in concrete somewhere on the property.

How’s this for an American story?

A young couple makes their way from Mexico for a better life in the United States, landing in California about the time the greatest white female blues singer of the psychedelic era dies of a heroin overdose in Los Angeles.

The couple works hard and does well, saving enough money over the years to finally buy a home. Decades later, they migrate to Port Arthur where there is work in the refineries and housing costs a fraction of what it does in Southern California.

Innocently – how could they know if no one tells them? – the Sanchez family buys a dead rock star’s house. Not any dead rock star but an icon of the rock era, the woman for whom Leonard Cohen wrote “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” whose name is respectfully mentioned in the same breath as Hendrix.

David and Alicia Sanchez bought the Joplin family home in August of 2007 and were immediately distressed to find people hanging out on the front lawn with cameras, peeping in the windows and knocking on the door.

No one thought it important to tell them what they were buying.

Now there is a state historical marker out front to let everyone know.

Downtown Fredericksburg.

All I have is a jar of peanut butter, a drug store notebook and all the time in the world.

“It’s a long, long road,” sings Johnny Winter of life along the white-lined asphalt. “And it don’t never end …”

I keep moving — driving from one end of the country to the other and back again (and again and again and again as 2008 moves through the seasons) — and try to forget, that I never made these journey when I should have.

Who is the King of Should?

Should – where our lost years coagulate into maps printed on onion skin– is a planet unto itself.

When?

The Carter Administration, when I was young enough to get into the kind of trouble that really sets the pot a boiling.

Age 18, 19, and 20 when I was going steady with the prettiest girl I’d ever met, the kindred “I’m gonna be a writer one day too” Deborah Rudacille of 7872 Harold Road in Dundalk.

By the time we were 22, it was too late — married with one on the way.

And then one more and then – with the birth of our youngest, the playwright Sofia Alvarez – old Flat Top had dropped the middle class hammer, declaring: One and one and one is three.

I wouldn’t begin taking the classic cross-country trips with all the kids in a station wagon until after the 1989 divorce.

One of the last stains on the marital death bed was a summer 1988 blues journey I took through Mississippi – from Baltimore on through Tupelo to Vicksburg and back via the Delta — with friends Tyrone Crawley and Art “The Living Legend” Lien.

It was not a suitable journey for a family vacation.

-o-
Absent the body part of a famous person — the most heralded example being the genius brain in the 2001 memoir Driving Mr. Albert, by Michael Paterniti – road trip narratives are enhanced when you have someone to spar with.

The insufferable Neal Cassady – Moriarty to Kerouac’s Paradise, perhaps named as Jack passed through Moriarty, New Mexico –was a champion sparring partner. His rival is surely Sancho Panza.

I am grateful, however, to have my own brain along for the ride – “every voice in my head wants to talk to you, baby” – given the punishment it took from adolescence to early adulthood.

The older I get, savoring a contentment that hovered invisible and beyond my reach during the years of self-inflicted battery, I don’t enjoy talking to people for more than 15 minutes. Or wish to be trapped in a car with them for a thousand miles.

Thus, it’s just me and not a whole lot happens.

Do the other road trip books leave out the boring parts?

Maybe I’m lucky.

Traveling by thumb or Greyhound provides ample flint and friction for narrative.

The Baltimorean Mary Carol Reilly, a hearty wanderer who first went cross country in 1963 – “I’d just come out of the convent,” said the 1960 graduate of Seton High School – travels almost exclusively by bus.

“In 1999 I was on a bus to California for my niece’s graduation. We were in Kansas when I found out my mother had died,” said Reilly, who turns 69 on August 9th. “I rented a car and drove back across the country [for] home.

“I planned my mother’s funeral from a table at McDonald’s.”

In the caballo blanco – a 2006 Tacoma with a mattress in the back — it’s just me, a kneeling figurine of the Blessed Mother super-glued to the dashboard [salvaged from a crèche in the attic of a girlfriend’s mother when her Mom passed away] and enough money for gas and used books at yard sales.

I cruise and daydream, writing ideas for stories on index cards ala Tom Nugent, tossing them in with the dirty laundry in the back as I roll from Sheffield through Ozona and some 40 miles east into Junction, which straddles the Llano River darn near the dead-center of Texas.

In Ozona – first known as Powell Well upon its founding in 1891 and then named for the air itself – I met a couple from Denmark who were canvassing the United States in a rental car and sleeping in a tent. I gave them one of my unopened jars of peanut butter, sent an email to the address they provided and never heard a word in return.

Pulling into Junction after dark, I slept in the back of the truck on the parking lot of a truck stop serviced by a combined Chevron gas station and McDonald’s, close enough to the drive through to hear “How can I help you?” rattle through the squawk box all night.

National Museum of the Pacific War

In the morning, now January 16th, the same things that bedeviled my chilly slumber – bright lights, noise, 24-hour commerce – became the convenient place to brush my teeth, wash my face, use the toilet and get a hot cup of dollar coffee for the ride east.

n Fredericksburg, I decamp at a Main Street coffee and write in the back of the store, deadlines for $75 and $100 a pop stories — two phone calls, an Internet search, and a thousand words — one of the reasons I often cover less than 200 miles on any given day.

I am writing for the Baltimore Examiner, a struggling but slowly catching on free daily. By year’s end, the tough little tabloid will be thrown out on Pratt Street by owner Philip Frederick Anschut and shot in the head.

But now – on deadline in the back of a coffee shop in Fredericksburg, Texas — I don’t yet know this. I’m an out-of-work screenwriter in the third month of a bitter strike with the Writers Guild of America. When I make it back to Baltimore, at least I will be broke among friends.

Sipping coffee, I read recent correspondence from the poet Madeleine Mysko. At first, she makes small talk, asking if I took time to visit the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg.

“It was sort of depressing,” she wrote, “but I looked up stuff about my father, who served on an aircraft carrier.”

Then she mentions a bowl of Texas chili so big she took a photograph of it.

And then addresses the alchemy – perfected by masters such as Borges, Saramago and Bolano — of sprinkling fairy dust [silver gelatin if you’re Gene Smith or Arbus] over mere fact to make magic.

Like taking Mary Carol Reilly’s heartache out from under the Golden Arches and minting the durability at its core.

“Certain stories become opportunities to discovery and that opportunity is there for the storyteller as much as the reader,” said Mysko. “By releasing myself from the worry of remembering exactly how it really was I tend to the story in a way that is somehow more pure … they aren’t really our stories anyway.”

I’m pretty sure my umbilical cord went out with the rest of the trash the day I was born at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, the same year Elvis joined the Army.

Vintage Route 66 road house, Shamrock, Texas

For no matter how far my travels – whether to Bangkok or Bangor (or in this dispatch merely a hundred miles in West Texas) — I always come home.

On Tuesday, the 15th of January, I awoke in a sleeping bag in the back of the truck and made a short, 30 mile hop east from Bakersfield, Texas to Sheffield for morning coffee. I pulled off of Interstate-10 at the exit to Iraan because the spelling intrigued me.

Was it the transcription of a southern drawl pronouncing the modern name for Persia?

Did the keyboard stick under the pinky finger on the sign maker’s left hand?

Iraan?

Locals pronounce it “Eye-ruh-ann,” a mashing of the first names of Ira and Ann Yates, a ranching couple on whose land the town emerged. Iraan is home to a museum and kiddie park honoring the cartoonist V.T. Hamlin, [1900-to-1993] who created the Alley Oop comic strip when he lived there. The diversion stands at 9261 Alley Oop Lane.

About 18 miles south of Iraan on Route 349 in the Pecos County town of Sheffield, I had coffee in a Styrofoam cup Granddad’s convenience store – 608 Main Street — and met proprietors Bruce and Jane Goforth.

Somewhere, I have photos of Jane, a former airline stewardess, making mammoth burritos [some of her trucker customers keep them warm on the dashboard, others heat up cold ones on the engine] and Bruce holding court.

The Goforth pix have vanished within large tubs of uncatalogued photographs taken on more than two-dozen cross-country journeys since my first, a 1978 summer jaunt from Crabtown to Chicago to see the Rolling Stones at Soldier Field and interview Studs Terkel at his radio studio. I rarely lose photographs and often find them a day or so after the need for them has passed.

Map of Iraan, Pecos County, Texas.

Like ballplayers that keep suiting up for one more season, the Goforths had a pile of 32 nuptial extensions by the time I visited.

Bruce, who touted the store’s bathroom as “the cleanest in Texas,” was exporting radio communication equipment when the couple met. Jane was telling people how the seat belts worked on Western and then Delta jetliners.

When they retired to Sheffield, Granddad’s was for sale and they kept the name because “everyone knew it.”

“On a busy morning, we’ll sell out of burritos, ” said Jane, who was reading “Echoes,” by the Irish writer Maeve Binchy [author of “Circle of Friends,” which became a Minnie Driver movie] when I arrived.

A converted gas station on a sparse and forgotten Main Street orphaned by the velocity of the nearby interstate, Granddad’s is a hybrid descendent – part restaurant, part general store — of the Depression-era, Route 66 diners, the long-gone kind painted with the accuracy of Rockwell and the honesty of Hopper by John Steinbeck in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

“… at one end of the counter, a covered case; candy cough drops, caffeine sulphate called Sleepless, No-Doze; candy, cigarettes, razor blades, aspirin, Bromo-Seltzer, Alka-Seltzer.

The walls decorated with posters, bathing girls, blondes with big breasts and slender hips and waxen faces, in white bathing suits – see what you get with a Coca-Cola Long bar, and salts, peppers, mustard pots, and paper napkins. Beer taps behind the counter, and in back the coffee urns, shiny and steaming, with glass gauges showing the coffee level.

And pies in wire cages and oranges in pyramids of four …”

Alley Oop illustration by Hamlin

In that first month of the 2008 presidential primaries – Obama had just beaten Hillary in the Iowa caucuses and tied her in New Hampshire — they did have anti-liberal bumper stickers for sale at the cash register.

[“Defeat Obama, Osama and Chelsea’s Mama.”]

“People don’t have time for you to make something for them fresh from scratch,” said Jane when I asked if there was pie to go with the coffee. “But then they’ll sit down for 20 minutes and tell you their life story.”

An entire life in 20 minutes.

Bruce settled in to unspool his tale as I ate a breakfast burrito. It wasn’t long until his biography swerved toward a defense of the war in Iraq, then some five years old.

“Getting rid of Saddam,” he said. “Is just like defending the Alamo.”

“Surely you can’t be serious,” I said.

He assured me that he was.

The Gofroths were as hospitable as a couple could be, as interested in my life as I was in theirs.

I took a bite of the burrito and said: “How about baseball. Do you like baseball?”

Madeleine Mysko, author of "Bringing Vincent Home."

Pushing east – traveling like the tortoise and not the hare — I hit Marfa on deadline for a story about a woman who, some 40 years earlier, spent time in Texas altogether more profound, horrific and transcendent than the stones I skipped from El Paso to Beaumont.

Madeleine Mysko, a Baltimore poet, had just published Bringing Vincent Home, a novel about her time as a Vietnam-era nurse in the burn unit at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston.

Years ago, I was introduced to Madeleine by the journalist and poet Ann LoLordo, who graduated from the Johns Hopkins University writing seminars with Mysko in 1992.

When I sent LoLordo a note from Marfa saying I was interviewing Mysko for the Baltimore Examiner, LoLo – then writing editorials for The Sun – dispatched a bushel and a peck of questions.

Q: “Why are you writing for the Examiner?”

A: “Because I’m on strike with the writers in Hollywood and the Examiner has been publishing anything I write.”

Q: “How much are they paying you?”

A: “Not enough.”

And then this about the place that Ann and I both called home for more than half our lives: “Things are really dicey/crazy at the paper,” she wrote. “I almost quit and now find myself one of the last people on deck.”

Marfa shown with red dot.

A one-time UPI wire service reporter whose childhood family road trips were Long Island to Florida jaunts with stops at South of the Border for fireworks and pecan logs, Ann had worked at The Sun as a respected reporter and editor since 1980.

“When things started going south, I always felt I could keep up or do rewrite because I was an ex wire service reporter,” lamented LoLordo.

It was not to be and the tough, once-a-reporter-always-a-reporter with the Jesuit education found solace in writing that doesn’t perish with the next news cycle. As did Madeleine.

In the prologue to Bringing Vincent Home – published in 2007 by Plain View Press of Austin – Mysko assumes the fictional persona of Kitty.

“Last year,” says Kitty, “a photograph of me appeared on the front page of The Baltimore Sun. I’m the one in the big hat, holding the sign with the number of soldiers killed in Iraq.

“We’re out there every Friday between noon and one, unless bad weather forbids. I usually wear an over-sized black T-shirt with a white peace symbol on the front. If it’s cold, I wear my good black coat.

It’s a great photograph, and after it appeared I got phone calls from people I hadn’t seen in ages, including Alma Henderson, who lived next door to me forty years ago.  Alma is ninety-two now.

“The first thing she said to me was, “Are you crazy, hon?” and we had a good laugh.

“I put the clipping from the Sun on the shelf in my dining area, next to the old photograph of me with my son Vincent, which was taken in December 1968, on the Sunday before he left for Vietnam.

“In that photograph, we’re standing in front of the house on Constance Avenue. Vincent is wearing his uniform, and he’s smiling right into the camera. Of course I’m smiling too, though perhaps less confidently.

“In truth, all these years I have never been one to take part in peace demonstrations. And so the irony in a newspaper clipping of me—an old woman now, sitting out there on a beach chair with a peace symbol on my shirt—wasn’t lost on my daughter Mary Kate.

“Look at you, Mom,” she said, with a sly smile.

“I like it that on Fridays this group of women sits silently at the curb, dressed in black and holding up calls for peace to the cars passing by. But week after week, as I held the number of the dead on my lap, something was gnawing at me: Was it enough?

“One day I sat down at the computer the children gave me for Christmas and began to write for all I was worth.

“My name is Kitty Duvall. I’m eight-four now, and/ I know my memory isn’t perfect. But in the writing I lived it all over again.”

She spoke about 1969, when she was a newly commissioned Army nurse — a 22-year-old second lieutenant — and I was an 11-year-old kid simultaneously rooting for the most feared, and ultimately doomed, team in baseball while imagining myself at Woodstock.

Mysko: "I don't remember my Dodge Dart looking as cool as this."

Accompanied by her mother, Madeleine made a road trip toward an experience about as far removed from Woodstock as white shoes and white stockings are from nakedness and mud.

“I set out from Baltimore in my own car — a white Dodge Dart I bought with my own money,” remembered Mysko. “We headed for San Antonio following AAA maps. I had never driven further than Washington DC and didn’t know what I was doing.

“I got a speeding ticket in rural Virginia and then we stopped at some place called Crappie Hole. My mother still talks about that place to this day.”

[Cartographer’s note: With a name that has delighted generations of kids staring out the backseat window on a long road trip, the Crappie Hole is a bait-and-tackle joint in the town of Chapin in central South Carolina, some 550 miles south of Baltimore.]

By the time we got to Texas, we started hearing about a tornado on the radio and my mother was terrified. Stupidly, I drove on, stupidly. Later we learned that we were close to the touchdown! That’s about all I remember about the trip.”

A simple road trip – unyielding cops, crappie holes and tornados notwithstanding – could not stand with what awaited Mysko at the Fort Sam Houston burn unit.

So transcendent was the ordeal – one that included an impulsive marriage to a soldier she believed was imminently bound for Southeast Asia (but wasn’t) — that she chose the art of fiction to tell the greater truths of the experience.

[“I'm a poet first, novelist second,” explained Mysko. “It's very slow going.”]

Over satellite signals from Towson to Marfa, she spoke of soldiers who had no recollection of the fresh hell each new day brought.

“By releasing myself from the worries about remembering exactly how it really was,” she said. “So I tended to the story in a way that was somehow more pure …”

Standing in line for my turn at the counter, I made small talk with a grade school teacher who reminded me of my third-grade teacher at Linthicum Elementary School, the late Jean Ortgies.

Mrs. Ortgies — born Jean Cameron Mathewson in New York City — read the classics of E.B. White aloud to us in the afternoons, with the blinds pulled down, passed away in 2006 at the age of 98. I had the good fortune to speak at her memorial service, which I did in a Dr. Seuss t-shirt.

The woman at the post office taught the fourth grade. After I gave her one of my books from the back of the truck, she invited me to speak to her class the following day about the writing life.

The prospect of a child abandoning themselves to art drives most parents batty. Numerous are the times a mom or dad has come up to me at high school “career day” event to say: “What do you really think about this writing thing? I mean, I don’t mind if she wants it as a hobby, but I’d rather she have something solid to fall back on.”

True artists know that there is nothing solid in this world. And talking to little kids about writing — especially those about 8 or 9, the age when I decided to become a writer in Mrs. Ortgies’ class – is especially important to me.

But I couldn’t wait a day. I had to get back on the road.

I cruised about 50 miles on Route 67 before hooking up again with Interstate 10.

On the radio, Garrison Keillor informed me that it was the birthday not just of the traitor Benedict Arnold, but a writer who left behind a long shelf of work, one I had not heard of: Emily Hahn [1905-to-1997.]

Emily Hahn, a writer in the habit of taking her pet gibbon to Shanghai dinner parties.

And this: Hahn’s entire writing career – more than 50 books and 200 essays and short stories, a vocation which saw her published to the very end — can be summed up in a phrase from the headline on her New York Times obituary – “CHRONICLER OF HER OWN EXPLOITS.”

It is what I have strived for – fought for and paid a pretty price for – from the time of my first by-line in 1977 for the infant City Paper.

Once, while in conversation over eggs with David Simon about a book I hoped to write that might be my ticket out of The Sun newsroom, he suggested: “Why don’t you just call it Me.”

Simon was being sarcastic and I was dead serious – “I always wrote about me when I could,” avowed John Lennon — which made his point all the more sharp.

Hahn’s career began with a road trip, a 1924 excursion across the country at age 19 in a Model T Ford; a 2,400 mile trip in which she and a girlfriend disguised themselves as men to better do as they pleased.

Her letters home were exquisite and compelling. A brother-in-law sent them to the then-fledgling New Yorker. The dispatches were well received and thus began a lifetime association with the magazine, which made her their China correspondent a few years later.

Hahn’s first book – Seductio ad Absurdum: The Principles and Practices of Seduction — A Beginner’s Handbook — was brought out in 1930 by Brewer & Warren of New York.

Some 51 titles followed. The Baltimore County Public Library has none in their collection, the result, surmised director Jim Fish, of none being borrowed over the years before the “DISCARDED” stamp came down.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library lists more than two dozen, including a first-edition of Lorenzo: D. H. Lawrence and the Women Who Loved Him, from 1975. It appears someone borrows a copy of an Emily Hahn book from the Pratt about once a year.

Soon after Hahn’s passing (she was in her New Yorker office a week before “popping off,” as Doris Lessing refers to death),  Faber and Faber of Boston published Ken Cuthbertson’s definitive biography of her, its title taken from the author’s favorite phrase.

Nobody Said Not to Go.

I made my way to Mass at St. Vincent de Paul Church in Silver City, a sanctuary completed in 1876, two years before the founding of the mining town.

I don’t often walk out of Mass before Communion, but I walked out of this one.

St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church, Market Street. Photo: Macon Street Books

The white pastor – the Rev. Rod Nichols, credited in a plaque with overseeing the church’s 2006 renovation – was preaching about St. John of the Cross and the dark night of the soul, a favorite subject.

He lectured in English to a mostly Hispanic congregation, and perhaps it was because of the language barrier, but it was one of the most condescending public performances I have witnessed.

Maybe the problem was me since I was the visitor and these folks seemed at ease with Father Rod’s third grade Sunday school approach.

But it pissed me off, and I left without receiving the Eucharist, which many times is the only reason I attend Mass.

I drove back to Los Pinos Circle, where I was staying with Eric Mithen, a friend who had moved west from Baltimore.

At Mithen’s yellow, Formica-topped table [bought for $50 in June 2004 at a Patterson Park flea market], I worked on an exegesis of my own dark night, a series of connected fictions called The Long Vietnam of My Soul.

And then I took the daily nap that for almost two decades has been my custom, necessity, and well-defended joy, a luxury that a yacht or Porsche cannot approach.

Rafael Alvarez on Los Pinos Circle. Photo: Macon Street Books

Unless you work night shift, there are few things more subversive or derided in American culture than sleeping in the middle of the day. I am convinced that employers would more readily endure protracted thefts from a star employee than a worker who insists on napping in the afternoon. Whether or not the time is made up for later doesn’t matter: you snooze, you lose.

In 2003, I kept a sleeping bag in my South Clinton Street office while a member of the season two writing staff of The Wire.

The bag was relied upon with such set-your-watch regularity that series creator David Simon instructed an assistant turned screenwriter named Norman Knoerlein to buy a blow-up sex doll, dress it in cheap lingerie, and hide the plaything between the covers before my siesta.

Pretty funny. But of no help when the “two hour naps” ended up on a laundry list of real and exaggerated affronts when the show and I parted ways.

Leaving The Wire immediately led me to Los Angeles–my first-ever move away from Baltimore–and that led to years of driving from one end of the country to the other.

The need for sleep in the middle of the day (my physician says I have a narrow air passage) is the reason my road trip vehicle is no longer the VW Beetle in which my son Jake and I logged 10,000 miles over the summer of 2000.

Since 2006, I have piloted a pick-up truck with a cap on the back, the carpeted bed of the white Toyota–my caballo blanco–for an easy cargo of pillows, blankets, sleeping bags, and books.

So that on these cross country jaunts–enough in this closely observed year of 2008 to count on both hands–I can pull over whenever and just about wherever I want.

On the parking lot of a McDonald’s (one with a shade tree in the summer) or interstate rest area, I close myself up in the back like John Glenn in a Gemini capsule, read for a half hour, and fall asleep without a care in the world.

And I think it is exactly this comfort which, upon editing these accounts, makes the journey of 2008 feel less compelling than the exalted road trips documented by others.

Fort Hancock, Texas

By way of example: Early in my friendship with Mithen , which was a year or so after his transformative immersion into the short stories of John Cheever, he remained agitated by adventure as mapped out by Kerouac.

Mithen was determined to make good on a long-held dream of walking across the United States. He was going to carry an American flag and practiced by walking from Highlandtown to Bolton Hill and back with a sack of rocks over his shoulders, and though I teased him about it, I admired the goal.

While reading about the select club of people who have walked from one end of United States to the other, I became intrigued with an almost-fatally overweight man named Steve Vaught. Hoping to lose a significant portion of his estimated 400 pounds, Vaught left suburban San Diego on April 10, 2005 and arrived in Manhattan 13 months later.

Vaught apparently didn’t lose as much weight as he expected, somewhere between 40 pounds according to a filmmaker who joined him on the trip and 110 pounds, as he claimed.

He did lose his wife to divorce before the walk was over, and there was controversy about whether his courage and stamina flagged at times and if he accepted rides.

Yet Vaught’s effort remains impressive; more so than the 14-year [1983-to-1997], on-again-off-again walk from Manhattan to Washington State by Art Garfunkel, who was followed by a camper in which he slept at night.

Which story would you rather read?

The most subversive thing I did in Silver City?

I ventured into the silent stacks in the library of West New Mexico University–founded in 1893 on a hill overlooking town–and slipped photocopies of Baltimore stories into dusty books on forgotten shelves.

In special collection rooms, I secreted a CD-rom of my on-going autobiography (a time line of Thanksgiving dinners going back to 1975, the last year my Italian grandmother was alive) in equally forgotten tomes; wondering, if and when it is found, the technology needed to read a CD will have survived.

And knowing that if it hasn’t, black marks scratched into drywall and white paper will endure.

How long?

“Until,” wrote Philip K. Dick, “the library was discovered and dug up — and read … [a wait] not 40 years but 2000 …”

I left Silver City at dusk after the late afternoon nap, the cooler carrying leftovers from my Sunday dinner with Mithen (who instead of losing a spouse on a cross-country walk, abandoned the idea, and took a wife instead) and a hunk of gourmet cheese from a weekend pot-luck.

Western New Mexico University

That evening I made 213 miles to Fort Hancock, Texas. The route took me south to Deming, New Mexico, east to Las Cruces and then south through El Paso before finding a suitable parking lot to pull over in Fort Hancock–a staple of the I-10 route–and zipping up in the back.

When it’s freezing outside, the bag is perfect for sleeping as long you don’t have any skin exposed. I have been woken up by the tip of an ear stinging in the cold.

McDonald’s coffee for breakfast in Fort Hancock early Monday morning, and then, after a hundred miles or so toward the fabled town of Marfa, I pulled over for a bowl of cereal.

With a pint of convenience store milk in a waxed carton, I dropped the tailgate to the Tacoma and sat by the side of the road with Corn Chex (one metal spoon for the trip, one red plastic bowl) and munched the toasty corn goodness while a mile-long freight train passed through the desert.

No one around but me in the cool morning, my feet dangling from the tailgate, chewing in rhythm with the sounds of the rolling train cars.

Would not the story be better if I was on the freight train, cold and hungry and envious as I watched some lucky guy eat a bowl of cereal?

Only if the guy on the train took the time to write it.

Today’s adventures of Ralphie on the Road began in the second week of January 2008 with a simple grilled cheese sandwich outside of Willcox, Arizona and –- like a pungent aroma that leads you by the nose –- arrived at pedestals laden with fancy pants cheese 120 miles to the east in Silver City, New Mexico.

“A good, soft stinky cheese,” as M.F.K. Fisher wrote in her World War II memoir, How to Cook A Wolf.

On Friday, January 11 – with the Hollywood writers’ strike grinding forward, the first month in a year without steady work in which I crisscrossed the continent a dozen times –- I woke up in the back of my Tacoma pickup truck on the parking lot of a 24-hour House of Pancakes near Willcox. From there I drove east along Interstate-10 to Silver City, a town of 10,000 or so celebrated in a 1971 song by Ry Cooder about Billy the Kid.

To get to Silver City –- once an encampment for the Apache and then a small Spanish town known as San Vicente de la Cienega before American prospectors turned the volume up in the 1860s and named it for a precious metal -– head north on Highway 90 off of I-10 in Lordsburg in far southwestern New Mexico. It was while driving along Highway 90 that I learned my Aunt Betty had passed away in Berlin on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Betty Jones was born Elizabeth Feehley on November 11, 1929 and grew up catercorner from the Pratt Library Branch [circa 1886] on South Ellwood Avenue in Canton. She was the wife of my mother’s oldest sibling and only brother, Bill Jones. Uncle Bill took me to my first major league baseball at Memorial Stadium in 1967 and two years later brought me to see the first game of the 1969 World Series, the only one the Orioles won against the Mets, a 4-to-1 victory behind the late Mike Cuellar, a Cuban who once pitched for the Havana Sugar Kings.

Betty Feehley Jones (right) with her mother-in-law, Anna Potter Jones (1911 to 1996) in the 1950s

As much as I remember the glorious baseball -– true Oriole baseball — I also remember Uncle Bill’s bottomless bag of homemade crab cakes, fabulous little balls of golden fried back-fin.

“I had a crush on Betty before I ever talked to her,” said Uncle Bill, remembering his days growing up in the 2700 block of Dillon Street near St. Casimir Church. “Once I was playing curb ball with my cousin Stanley, and she was walking down the street to visit a girl who lived on our block. Somebody hit a ball that when clear over my head when I wasn’t looking and Stanley says, ‘Either go talk to her or play ball …’”

Arriving in Silver City late on the afternoon of Friday the 11th, I pulled up in front of the Los Pinos Circle home of Eric Mithen, a Baltimorean who once painted a series of Dee Dee Ramone posters at my rowhouse on Macon Street. Together we published a handful of chapbooks featuring ourselves and other Crabtown writers, like one devoted to the recently departed Footlong Franks, stapled photocopies of content greater than the vehicle which carried it, pamphlets that I happily gave away at diners and gas stations on my treks across time zones.

I met Mithen in the spring of 2001 and before the summer was out his life had been changed forever through an immersion in the short stories of John Cheever. A few years and a marriage later, he left the humidity of Crabtown for the arid glare of the great southwest with his bride Andrea Riley, a Hopkins-trained nurse with a two-year commitment at a community hospital in Lordsburg.

“Baltimore’s last words to me were ‘Bitch Ass Nigga’ spray painted on the side of a moving van in Hampden,” said Mithen. “I waved it goodbye, and hit the gas for Silver City, a small, isolated town two hours north of the Mexican border. Once there, I began calling Silver a ‘one-Walmart town’ because of the bitter dependency we developed for the super store.”

Classic Pontiac Firebird languishing in the dust by the side of the road on the way into Silver City.

Though mundane necessities in abundance at the Walmart on U.S. Route 180 — printer cartridges, cotton balls, DVDs nobody wants to watch, and cases of cheap drinking water – the cheese department is rather limited. But because Silver City has aspirations to be a mini-me of Santa Fe (an objective effectively blunted by the economy and an ornery streak in the locals) there is a gourmet shop downtown with the appropriately ridiculous name of the Curious Kumquat.

“We were happy to find a store that sold international foods in a town where auto parts shops outnumbered grocery stores,” said Mithen. “And no matter what I bought at the Kumquat, even if it was just pita bread, the owner would always ask what I was making.”

In time, the Crabtown expatriates would make the most of a Moroccan tagine, a clay cooking pot of various shapes (Mithen’s has a conical lid to circulate the steam) that lends its name to dishes found throughout the stories of Paul Bowles.

“Moroccan food requires a few ingredients you can’t get at Walmart, and the Kumquat had them all — saffron, pickled lemons, orange blossom water,” said Mithen, who used Kitty Morse’s Cooking at the Kasbah (Chronicle Books) to practice with his new cooking toy.

Before long, Rob Connoley, one of the Kumquat’s owners, was inviting Mithen and Riley to join a select group of Silver residents: the “Cut the Cheese Club.”

“Every other month they hosted a party featuring high-end cheese flown in from around the world and unveiled the night of the event. Club members could buy it wholesale – the only price of admission was a covered dish,” said Mithen, adding, with a sense of humor that finds Sifl & Olly on a par with Laurel & Hardy: “What’s not to like about good food and a fart joke?”

The Buffalo Bar, Bullard Street

The club sometimes met in the courtyard of an apartment complex that had once been a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, the site selected because of Silver city’s thin, dry air at 6,142 feet above sea level. When I joined the group for a fromage unveiling on Saturday evening, the pageant of regal curds was held at Gallery 400 on Market Street.

In a note to my Mom back home in Linthicum, scribbled on the back of a disposable camera photo I took of the Buffalo Bar downtown, I wrote: “I bought a hunk of ‘Old Quebec’ for the road ahead. . .an Italian guy from San Francisco who runs a restaurant called ‘Spaghetti Western’ makes his own sausage using his grandfather’s stuffer . . . a long metal contraption. I told him about your Mom’s steer horn used to push kielbasa into casings … I’ve made some new friends and new readers … this is the life for me …”

Les and Anette at the January 2008 “Cut the Cheese” party

[Old Quebec is an extra-sharp cheddar made of Canadian cow’s milk and aged a minimum of three years. It is not as crumbly as other aged cheddars and is fabulous when grilled between the kind of crusty bread baked at DiPasquale in Highlandtown, an experience far beyond the sandwich I got at the IHOP in Willcox. And far beyond even this: how often I have wished for cheese made from the rich milk of a reindeer mare – which provides no more than a cupful a day in the most productive part of the season – milk so fatty that when the cheese is made there is little trace of whey left over.]

The life for me: knowing I will enjoy reindeer cheese in the most unlikely situation if only I keep moving; a life of continually encountering the kind of people that Mithen and Riley didn’t meet as much as they would have liked before completing a two-and-a-half year commitment to New Mexico and moving to the shores of the Skagit River in Washington State.

Good people — both interesting and accomplished, even if the world has yet to catch up with those accomplishments; folks like Les Rubin and his schatzi Anette Wuensch, both of whom were “Cut the Cheese” regulars.

Alvarez (far left) with Mithen and Riley at the Spaghetti Western.

Anette works in mosaic and baked tiles in a backyard kiln that looks like a miniature Weber grill. Lucky for Mithen, he doesn’t get her kiln confused with his tagine. Silver City was good to Anette, with commissions for her southwest landscapes coming in from around the town and beyond. Though now in Seattle with Les, Gotham City calls her name.

Rubin -– an administrator who worked with Riley at the Lordsburg hospital — is what I like to call a “mitzvah-driven” man, someone who has chased good deeds around the world because the harvest is as fascinating as the workers are few. When I asked him about Jimmy Carter’s battle against guinea worm and other plagues, Rubin said: “Carter says exactly what he thinks. That’s rare today.”

Over three days in Silver City, I enjoyed three good meals with good friends, beginning the night of Friday the 11th at a restaurant combining the verve of southwestern food with the best of Italy by way of San Francisco. The place was called “Spaghetti Western,” and Jake Politte owned the joint, did the cooking, and ground and stuffed his own sausage. Politte’s roast chicken with rosemary and potatoes was about the best I’d ever had.

“I think Jake gets bored fast because in the two years we lived in Silver his restaurant closed and re-opened three times,” said Mithen. “At first the place was strictly Italian family style, where everyone sat at a large table, and you ate with strangers . . . you ate whatever he had decided to cook that night. You had to make reservations two weeks ahead of time to get in.

Eric Mithen with hulk of a Dodge Matador in front yard just outside of downtown Silver City, New Mexico.

“He loved inviting people into the kitchen and dare them to name the ingredients in his new molé or custard. Every other month he left town to explore Oaxaca, shipping spices back to Silver. He once let me taste a red pepper that looked like a dark red pea. Dry and hard. I cracked it open and out came the type of seeds you find in any pepper. I tasted one seed, and the heat ruined my mouth for the rest of the night.

“Jake laughed and went out behind the building for a cigar … sitting back there in a lawn chair looking up at the sky, cigar smoke curling around him …”

Though Mithen often has a hankering for Politte’s pasta with homemade sausage, he doesn’t miss the guy who prepared those plates. The characters who continue to live in his imagination include Robert “Buck” Esslinger and Tim Rader.

Buck is a pensioner from Nebraska with a knack for finding petroglyphs –- images of snakes, deer, tricksters, and ghosts — scratched into rock by Native Americans back before white men began blasting through those rocks for silver.

“Tim Rader is on my list too –- he tells stories you can’t make up,” said Mithen. “He’s a Silver City native who moved around but always came back to Silver. When he was a kid, he would punch holes in a tin can with a nail and lay out at night looking up at the sky through the can — trying to line up the holes with stars in the sky . . .”

Photos: Macon Street Books

Sometimes I think I could cross the country on nothing more than coffee, gas, $9 truck stop showers every other day, and Pop Tarts.

Ninety-nine cents at any gas station in America.

Remember when Pop Tarts were only for breakfast? Now they’re in every convenience store in the country, right next to the Slim Jims. Does anyone really eat the chocolate ones? Gimme strawberry and blueberry.

Get me in the right mood, I will tell the greatest Pop Tart story of all time, one involving a picky eater named Guy Matricciani – if a fly buzzed through the kitchen he’d leave the table — and his mother, the sainted Angie Pompa Matricciani, who one day had had it with her son’s unending culinary complaints.

It’s enough to make an otherwise sane woman hop a Greyhound bus and ride.

Somewhere, but I’m not sure exactly where. Across an atlas’ worth of road trips that began in 1978 with a drive to Chicago to interview Studs Terkel and see the Rolling Stones at Soldier Field, I have tried to keep as accurate a captain’s log as possible.

To lean on my days at the Sunpapers when — if you forgot the “t” in Presstman Street — a copy desk hawk who drank Prohibition homebrew with Mencken would point out that your fly was open in front of the entire newsroom.

If narrative exactness exists beyond spelling and grammar, it is elusive.

In The Paris Review — issue No. 191, winter 2009 — Mary Karr observes that “… in the (1940s) memoir was akin to history, which was absolute.

“One reason for [our recent] surge in memoir is the gradual erosion of objective notions of truth … we mistrust the old forms of authority — the church and politicians, even science. The subjective has power now.”

Mary Karr: "We mistrust the old forms of authority ..."

The week I bought it, I drove from Baltimore to Rhode Island, headed west to Toronto to see the Blue Jays play at the SkyDome, and then to Detroit to spend a few days with a man who once called me friend, the writer Tom Nugent.

Before our communication breakdown, he wrote: “… the brown wren scrabbles in the dust [and] I hope your [grandfather’s] refrigerator is plink-plink-plinking as it madly thaws! You Spanish brigand, you luff-lubbing …”

And has yet to complete the sentence.

The next summer, my son and I drove that Bug 10,000 miles along the perimeter of the lower 48. Baltimore once again to Chicago (this time not to see Mick and Keith but my Aunt Dolores); over to St. Paul, Minnesota to see the house where Fitzgerald once lived; across the Badlands to the Crazy Horse monument; down to Antelope Island, Utah and then San Francisco and Los Angeles before pushing on to Vegas; the two days it always takes to cross Texas; a hop, skip, and a hello to Florida and then up every beach on the east coast to home.

The trip produced a series of articles for the Calvert Street Circular – collected in the Storyteller anthology — as well as an essay for the defunct arts journal called LINK.

Were my motoring notes more accurate a decade ago in the Volkswagen than the ones scribbled in 2008 in the Toyota Tacoma? The Caballo Blanco’s dashboard is narrow, curved, and cramped, without a plastic steering column vase, the perfect mobile pencil holder.

The highway signs rush by, and you grab the closest blank surface while looking for a pen that works — anything to capture the thought before it flies away.

Fair game: the inside covers of books bought at the last off-the-Interstate thrift store or yard sale – Call It Sleep by Henry Roth picked up for a buck in Van Horn, Texas back in 2004 ; receipts for coffee and cheeseburgers; and the stray greasy napkin.

There is also the duel between journals. What is closer at hand — one of the half-used Reporter’s Notebooks manufactured by Stationers, Inc., of Richmond, Virginia., and left on Macon Street by Joe Mathews before he quit the Sunpapers?

Or the more formal log collected in that year’s marbled composition book?

All while straddling Interstate 10 from the 10th to the 15th of January, 2008 like Slim Pickens riding THE BOMB.

[We will meet again, Dame Vera; and when we do I will make the facts and figures of our slumber in the truck jibe with your recollections. One artist’s memoir, another one’s myth.]

Last week’s debut column about crisscrossing the United States – a 2008 sojourn with visits to the shack of bluesman John Hurt in Mississippi, a search for the roots of Grapes of Wrath, in Oklahoma, and a Hollywood writers’ strike that lasted a hundred days – began on the wrong foot.

Alvarez at Writer’s Guild of Amer­ica rally, Pratt and Light streets, Decem­ber 2007.

I reported that I jumped in my Toyota pickup after a big bowl of cocido with my family on New Year’s Day in Baltimore and began driving west.

After cross-referencing various journals and work books, gas receipts, and airline statements, it seems that only the cocido part was true.

(I will soon make it up to you with my father’s recipe for the Spanish staple.)

As a kid I never understood how the Beatles could say they weren’t quite sure which American city they were in on any given day back when they owned the AM dial.

I do now.

The past five years – from 2005 when I flew from Paris to L.A. to take an apartment on through the summer of 2009 when I returned to my ancestral home of Crabtown – have been all pick-up-and-go. A backpack, a passport, some cash, a jar of peanut butter, and out the door. Of those years, none was more chaotic than 2008.

That is the way of folklore, not history.

What did happen: a few weeks before Christmas of 2007, I flew to Baltimore from L.A. to organize a rally in support of the Writer’s Guild of America, then went on strike for two months against Hollywood studios and networks.

The turnout at the corner of Pratt and Light streets was strong, with support from pipe fitters to government workers to teachers. I have a photo of my father – a lifelong member of the Seafarers International Union – and my ex-wife, the daughter of a steelworker, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with pickets.

I stayed through the holiday and, with my Toyota pickup back in LA., drove my mother’s not-long-for-this-world 1990 maroon Thunderbird around town. I passed New Year’s Eve at the Denny’s near the Motor Vehicle Administration on Ritchie Highway and in the first week of 2008, winged it back to the Golden State.

What memory cannot produce, computerized burger receipts can. My files show that just after 8 p.m. on Wednesday, January 9th, I bought an angus cheeseburger with bacon and a cup of coffee at a Santa Monica McDonald’s and rolled onto Interstate 10 headed east.

It was a short journey that night, a mere 125 miles to the town of Indio with 22,717 miles on the Toyota – El Caballo Blanco – and not the 47,018 miles reported last week. This is how well-meaning folks as myself wind up getting audited.

That first night I slept in the back of the truck on the parking lot of an ARCO gas station.

El Caballo Blanco. Photo: Macon Street Books

Waking early, I stopped at the Chiriaco Summit, a gas station, diner, and one-employee post office with a grotto shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe next door to a museum to General George S. Patton.

The outpost was launched by a man from Alabama named Joe Chiriaco who went to Pasadena in 1927 to see his beloved Crimson Tide play Stanford in the Rose Bowl and never returned to the Heart of Dixie.

I have stopped at Chiriaco so many times on the Interstate-10 jaunt from one end of the country to the other that I recognize the graffiti in the men’s room.

Each time, I say a silent “Hail Mary” to the Blessed Mother and leave something behind – a coin, a trinket, a note with the name of someone who needs help.

On this visit, after running some rosary beads through my fingers, I left a book in the alcove: A Jesuit Off Broadway, by James Martin, S.J. and published in 2007 by Loyola Press.

It was one of dozens of books being thrown away back in Malibu by the family of Martin Sheen. Valerie Sklarevsky, a Baltimorean who has lived in Malibu for 30 years, works as Sheen’s assistant. Valerie gave me several boxes of books from the Sheen family that were headed for recycling bin.

Some I kept, like a leather-bound Bible with Sheen’s name embossed in gold leaf on the cover (just one of countless gifts he regularly receives, outnumbered only by the amount of requests that come in), and others I gave away along the road.

At a rest stop near Quartzsite, Arizona, some 115 miles east of Chiriaco, I fell into small talk with a middle-aged biker who looked like a lot of the aging men I see at Johnny Winter concerts.

Instead of talking about blues or straddling a Harley as the world rushes by, he began espousing the curative role that Jesus has played in his life. And then asked if I wanted to say a prayer with him.
Okay,” I said, remaining silent as we held hands, and he gave praise to his Savior.

It made me uncomfortable – I much prefer silent, solitary prayer, enjoy being Catholic for that reason among others – and reminded me of a month I spent in Bangkok in 1993.

There on vacation and taking advantage of a chance to attend a press conference with the Dalai Lama, I befriended a newly retired high school teacher from San Francisco.

He was going through some difficulties with booze and liked keeping the channel open between himself and whatever it was he believed was keeping him from taking a drink.

While walking around the city together, we’d pass a temple or a sanctuary and he’d say: “Wanna pop in for a prayer?”

As casual as my Polish grandfather dropping by Aggie Silk’s on Hudson street in Canton for a quick belt of the hard stuff and a draft beer chaser.

In 2008, while scrambling between Baltimore and Los Angeles for work with stops in Tennessee for pleasure and the odd sojourn to New York City, writer Rafael Alvarez logged more than 20,000 miles on a Toyota pickup truck.

Pots of cocido to feed a guest list of 25 at the Alvarez family home in Linthicum on New Year's Day.

The journeys echoed those by John Steinbeck – who traveled in an old pie truck to research The Grapes of Wrath, the lonesome Catholic poet from Lowell whose name is synonymous with the American road trip – as well as those of the thousands of never-quite-made-the-big-time musicians who
crisscross the continent to make people forget their troubles for a spell.

The Toyota – a white 2006 Tacoma – is fitted with a small camper cap and Alvarez, who came of age on the City Desk of the Baltimore Sun and has collected narratives around the world, slept by the side of the road between dots on the map.

Over the course of 2010 – beginning with this New Year’s Day – Welcome to Baltimore, Hon! will publish a week-by-week journal of Alvarez’s 52-week adventure.

01.01.08

The year began on a Tuesday, and I began 2008 by participating in an all-day literary reading at the Patterson Theater, where my parents had their first date as teenagers in the early 1950s.

The same movie house where while all hopped up on Terry Hesse’s mother’s diet pills, I talked through all 165 minutes of Towering Inferno during a first-and-last date with Lucinda Ares, and where, as a newly divorced father, I took my kids to see Jim Varney’s Ernest movies for a buck before it became the home to the Creative Alliance.

(The original Patterson Theater opened at 3134 Eastern Avenue in 1910. It showed silent movies and had a dance hall on the second floor. It was closed in the first year of the Depression and razed for the current building, which opened in the autumn of 1930.

A sign over the entrance read “through these portals walk the most beautiful girls in the world,” doors darkened by many of my relatives, including my Uncle Victor’s wife, the former Claire Weigman, a beauty once known as “the flower of Clinton street.”)

At the reading, I was heartened to see Chuck Donofrio, hear him read poetry about the great outdoors and his love for it, and launch the year by wishing him health, prosperity, and happiness.

Alvarez (left) with poet Chuck Donofrio.

Said Donofrio between poets: “I have driven across country several times. First time was right after high school, I believe. That was the time I got stopped at the border into Canada. They put me in a cell with wonderful drawings of Mounties beating up wrongdoers: aka HIPPIES.

It was a most feeble bust . . .”

Driving from the Patterson and through the Inner Harbor to my parents’ house on Orchard Road in Linthicum – where my father prepared our family’s traditional New Year’s Day meal of cocido (a peasant cabbage and bean stew eaten throughout Spain) – my mother called to say that the family had just increased by a seven-pound baby girl.

Charlotte Anna Alvarez arrived that morning in Providence, Rhode Island, to my youngest brother, Victor, named for my uncle, and his wife, Annie McGarrah.

The child’s middle name honors my Polish grandmother, Anna Potter Jones [1911-1996], who was also no stranger to the Patterson movies over the years (though she preferred the big theaters downtown and took us to the Hippodrome to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, back when such extravaganzas came with programs and intermission).

At dinner, as been my custom for a decade or so, I passed around a virgin composition book – the kind from grade school with a marbled cover, a work journal for the coming year – and had each guest sign with a wish.

Early the next day, Wednesday, January 2, 2008, I tossed the notebook in the back of the truck to await all the joy and beatings of the coming seasons.

It is because of that journal, along with a database of emails from 2008 and notes scribbled in the margins of books I read that year (including The Savage Detectives, by Bolano and Agnon’s To This Day), that I am able to give this account.

On Wednesday morning, the journey began in earnest. I left Orchard Road at 9:30 a.m. for the first of many cross-country road trips in 2008. The odometer on the Toyota reads 47,018.

Within two days of shoving off, my debut column for the Baltimore Examiner (both column and paper would barely survive the next 12 months before succumbing) appears in a quaint technology called newsprint around Crabtown.

It begins: “Hello Baltimore, I’ve missed you. I haven’t written regularly for a newspaper in seven years, not since leaving the paper of Mencken in January of 2001.

Now, after a few years on ships and a few more in Hollywood, I am at the paper of Twain. It feels right, and it feels good. Like that special thing you think won’t ever happen again.

But then it does and you smile: How lucky am I?”

Photos: Macon Street Books