Screwhead

Originally published February 7th, 2023 via Substack

Prologue

By October I felt my head grow loose from my shoulders, and I needed bolts— not glue. 

“We’ve gotta get out of here! I’m sick of all this noise! I’m sick of college!” I said to my roommate, Holden, who was propped up on our windowsill; his feet plastered to the wall.

“Fuck, as long as I can do homework, you can take me wherever.” By the end of the week, we would find ourselves two hundred dollars in the negatives, in a car jettisoned out of Long Island City; set out EAST.

Screwhead

It was the week before Halloween and the only thing I could see from my— then-dissolving—mind was of water pacifying a fiery sinking sun. Something was calling me to get out of the city and skip rocks. I just knew skipping a few dozen would give my head a couple quarter turns. When I raved my escape to Holden, it was Tuesday afternoon and by 4 pm I had a car rented for us that Thursday. I was nineteen and thus lived all across the nation, from St. Louis to the Hudson Valley, from Sacramento to Denver! Now, sitting on Manhattan Island—America was, to me, a paper figure. The only state I could call a proper lover was Colorado, where I spent my important years before college, and now I felt like I had yet to shake New York’s hand. 

I called my mother on my laptop, to tell her the plan, or rather lack thereof. To tell her I had a car set aside for us in Queens with no idea where in the state to point it.

“We’ll find some state parks to sleep in, and just drive around until we have to return it on Saturday.” 

“Can you just please, remember to bring blankets then, Anak?”

On my screen, she went into her living room and procured a photo from an album. The still was of the two of us. I, plump and bright as a rice bun, adorned off of her bicep. She, no more than thirty, was smiling just so big. We were in front of a red door, and I carried my big soft head high and piously, turning a tie out of my bib rimmed in a baby blue stripe. 

“That’s when we lived in Bellport.” 

“Where’s that, St. Louis?”  I asked. 

“Long Island, Anak.” 

And there it was, the plan that had begun to drip and wring out. Come Thursday, we’d set the snout of our car, eastbound, out of Long Island City until there was no more pavement left to tear. On Thursday, we would go to Montauk and spend the next three days working our way back to the city. 

“Call when you get there. Okay?” 

When Thursday arrived, I stuffed a navy backpack with a few shirts and two pairs of pants, along with a toothbrush and toothpaste. I emptied an Advil container and filled it with three days' worth of Vitamin C, B12, Calcium-Magnesium-Zinc, and Creatine. I stuffed in the front pocket, two point-and-shoot cameras, three SD cards, and two rolls of film. Then, in the rest of the bag's space, I brought two notebooks— one to be finished and one brand new, a few pocket paperbacks by Joe Steinbeck, Charles Webb, and Ted Hughes; and writing utensils to last a month. I knew in my heart, that I would not come to not read or write in any of these, however, it eased me to have them. Taking the Subway to the car in Long Island City, I stared at us in the rattle of the 7-Train’s window reflection. Holden wore his trademarked bandana and made a high-fashion scarf out of two blankets wrapped around his neck. It made his backpack protrude behind him like a hunchback. I wore a thrifted blazer and a blue-striped work shirt that carried a black tie. We were ugly, arms already tired from the cargo. Both a week unshaven— and that was exactly it. To have a few ingrown hairs, prickled upper lips, and fuzzy necks was to make this three-day excursion abundantly clear— to find a good spot to skip rocks. This wasn’t Kerouac-ish ruckus or philandry. To ugly myself was to keep my head screwed on straight, screwed on EAST. 

The parking lot was a short walk from the subway station, and we were greeted by a big man double-managing the lot and the Italian Restaurant beside it. I showed him my ID and the requisite information, before he handed us the keys to a 2019 Nissan Sentra, commercially named: “Blue Thunder.” On my GPS, The Long Island Expressway glowed red till Hempstead; there couldn’t have been a worse hour to time our departure. We dragged ourselves out of the lot and barely scraped through incoherent New York traffic until we finally found ourselves on the freeway. At the peak of the road, upon us was a streak of red brake lights leading past the foreseeable horizon. War was between us and Montauk. However, this sluggish pace did allow us to watch the East American sky like a divine silver screen, the autumnal sun getting pulled down by each landlocked minute. 

As the earth retired, so did Holden, reclining his seat and dozing off. I lowered the music and gave myself time to get acquainted with the car. Two-wheel drive, ninety-thousand miles, and stiff axle. Quaint, but righteous in its own right. It had been three months since I had last driven a car. Although, that time was then under wildly different circumstances. It was in one of those swank high-tech electric cars, that I tore through the chaparral expanse of Orange County, California. Humming through their Pacific Coast Highway, whose brilliant network of roads practically steered the wheel for you. This car, this time, who I began to refer to in my mind as Betsy, instead dredged through New York’s Long Island Expressway. The LIE, where lanes lacked meaning and signage was purely a suggestion. Betsy a chariot, the elixir to solve my mania, and ticket to rock skippage. As the weekend would grow, I would find echoes between Betsy and the driving of my adolescence. Reverberations that would reach me from moments clapped years before. 

I had one hand on the wheel, and as if the glass wasn’t transparent, pointing at people trying to merge expleting “Fuck you! You stupid fuck! I will gut you like a fuckin’ pig!” I had since forgotten how much of a caveman I could be. Typically, the one hand on the wheel meant something entirely different, often to impress. Sometimes I’d preoccupy one of my hands holding some canned or bottled drink to roleplay recklessness. Other times, I’d leave my right hand, lifeless at the center console on the off chance there would be someone in shotgun to pick it up, maybe kiss the back of it. Often, it would be as simple as airing a cigarette while driving on backroads. However, this outrageous and farcical displacement of anger towards the road was not to impress– with Holden in the car, there was definitely no one to impress. That kid was far past the expiry date of my coolness.   

There was a time when I wanted to impress him, however. Actually, it was a time incredibly similar to this episode, one whose diegesis was instigated by college-induced mania. Jared was the Dickie Greenleaf to my Mr. Ripley. The kind of man whose similarity warranted a vein, mirror-like attraction. When we met in May of our senior year, it was under the terms and conditions that, in two months, we would have to depart each other to college. He, to Greely, Colorado; two weeks before I left for New York. He was the rare type of person I actually wanted to have loud profane conversations with. Whether that be over diner coffee, or in abandoned towns, or towards the walls of the jazz club we’d often– it didn’t matter. He would be the man who eventually introduced me to Holden. Jared was a five-foot-nine fountain of revelation and spectacle. To me, goodbye was a tragedy, now that I knew what a good man looked like. So, after a summer of ruckus, we met for the last time outside a Starbucks in the rain. 

“Send up a flare or two, alright?” Jared would say to me. 

“Write back alright?” I replied. 

Then three pats on the back and a kiss on the neck before driving off. One week later he called Holden and me, asking for help. He said he had just dropped out of college. 

We gladly obliged. Although unexpected, it was not unexplainable. On the phone, he bemoaned to us that the current American mythology of college fostered an environment of artifice. Every person that he talked to seemed to be of the same variant of the ornament-headed, craven, and uncooked individual that he just couldn’t stand. A few days before we had to help Jared move, Holden would text me to see if I could do the drive. He pleaded that he had such a gas-inefficient car, and it would be rude to drive his as Jared was compensating us with gas money. I didn’t mind either way, my only concern was that we hadn’t spent time together outside of the context of Jared and it was a four-hour round trip between Douglas County and Greely. Holden is six-foot-two, with noticeably long arms. He primarily wore a black wife beater, no matter the weather, under some sort of layer.  His face held this androgyny that I almost envied, and that he kind of hated. My car was too tiny for him, even with his chair completely set back and reclined, but he did not complain. He was recently getting over a cold, and my car had no tissues. So, he found and blew his nose on a sock that my mother left in the glove department. Even then, I was worried that he wouldn’t think I was cool. Before, on my way to pick him up, I thought over and prepackaged stories to entertain him with.  However, as soon as we hit I-25, it was hastily understood that that was unnecessary. Holden held the rare kind of intoxicating conversation that I missed in Jared– the typical plagiaristic revelations made by young men. We discussed how badly we wanted to escape Colorado’s claustrophobia, our myriad life goals, the failed loves of the summer, what kind of families we would eventually want, and what kind of stories we would want them to hear. He said to me, “Josh, I think the reason I like hanging out with you is ‘cause I’ve never met anyone who can hate people as much as I do.” Now, two years later, Holden was still my shotgun. He knew we’d be cold, sleeping in a car too small for either of us, and eating gas station food for the better part of three days. Except he also knew how I hated college, how I hated the way people started to see me, how I hated how much I was crying, how I hated how people felt like they needed to check up on me, how I hated how loud I was, how I hated my clothes, how I hated that I kept listening to the same three artists, how I hated how my friends said they loved me, how I hated how much I was looking at old photographs. So of course, he was there, legs up on the dashboard dozing off to the Ramones. Of course, he was there for me.  

It was 6:30 pm, finally outside the traffic and halfway through the Island. I thought of doing a pit stop at the Long Island Welcome Center. A terrifically maintained joint with an expansive gift shop and boutique foods store. Down towards the bathrooms was a Hall of Long Island Achievements. Records, memorabilia, and milestones. In my travels, I’ve grown to love the absurdity of gimmick-America. The absurdity that, for example, of all places, why did the Long Island Welcome Center have Billy Joel’s RIAA gold record for Glass Houses? It’s because somebody has to buy the local cold cut sandwiches and drink their hand bottled root beer. We only had two hours of road left to clear before we hit Montauk. Holden bought a coke and I did the same. He bought a bag of caramel corn; I got a black coffee and a monte-cristo sandwich. I popped the trunk, we sat on the edge of it, and picnicked under the moonlight. The pick-ups of burly blue collars and the Mercedes of shifty businessmen cycled in and out of the welcome center, purchasing their coffees and tobacco. Walking in and out, clocking the boy in a thrifted suit and his comrade in a bandana. 

“I’ll let you drive if we stop playing musical theatre for a bit.” I said. We had been playing Sweeny Todd for the past thirty-five miles. 

“We can stop all together.” 

“Great.”

“24-hour girls moaning compilation!” Rejoiced Holden. 

Now that Holden was awake, we talked music and old friends, but mostly how excited we were to see the stars. Stargazing was a luxury that we took for granted in non-light-polluted suburbia, but looking up, the sky was blank and it seemed that we were not far enough from the city for its influence to be entirely dissipated. Sitting on the trunk, it proved to be colder out here than in Manhattan, so before long, we brought our half eaten food into the car. Holden took the steering wheel and we were back on the road. We cut through the rest of Long Island, fervently trying to get to Montauk, as if we had a curfew. It was refreshing to be in the dark again, our headlights flossing the teeth of a simple two-way road. Through Suffolk county— the suburbs of Brentwood to Shirley, and then passing through the fabled Hamptons. I thought that, for a place often deemed as an oasis away from the city, East Hampton was so damn dismal! It reminded me of the opulent tragedy of towns like Vail or Breckinridge, vacation towns that died like leaves in the off seasons. It felt like seasonal community or optional neighbors, and its lack of permanence made me dizzy. A town’s natural homeostasis and systems ought not to be treated with the same purpose and utility as a Kleenex does. These barren houses sit like half empty tissue boxes. In other words, a suburban coastal beach town does not need a Swarovski.

As we crossed the Montauk welcome sign, my gaze was bisected by genuine-suburban-solemnity and Hampton-bleak-chic. We were between the gimmick America I so loved, and the liminality of Historic America that I sought to understand. Each surf board rental was the “best” or “original,” and each lamppost was connected to each other by pleated American flags. At 9pm, it was already a ghost town. Across the north side of the island was Massachusetts and on the south was the unending Atlantic sea. This reversion into suburbia fired a shot of unease in me, I began to feel claustrophobic in its expanse. Now that we finally arrived, Holden was asking the obvious question as to where we would set up camp. Spending one-hundred dollars at the singular local holiday inn felt idiotic, and after all, a pillar of this trip was to touch the dirt. Therefore, a bed felt sacrilegious to me (less so to Holden). We set our navigation to the closest state park to town center, but before leaving mainstreet, the both of us decided to stop for burgers at the only open shop in town. 

“Fuck, I’m gonna jump in the ocean” I said, mouthfull, now in the drivers seat.

“Why?” 

“To feel something. I don’t know.” 

“Did you bring a towel?” 

“No.” I said, peaking at myself through an angled rear view mirror. There was ketchup on my lip and I was sweating through my thrifted suit. For a second, the reflection yelled at me for what I was. Pathetic. Poor. This boy looked back at me, begging to skip rocks because things “got too loud.” Having left the city using money he did not have— Having left the city, he said he would have been fine being buried in two years prior. 

“You’re being so fucking dramatic” Holden said, crumpling the wax paper from his burger. 

“I know.” 

Holden was right. I did know it, and he heard that I knew it in my voice. Yet, I hated this self-awareness I had grown accustomed to that just cyclically justified itself for being. Self-awareness whose utility is to absolve, however, still lacking in the reconciliation I think it provides. I knew jumping in the ocean was a dramatic sentiment, but it didn’t make my hysteria any less real. 

“Well, when you jump and you get hypothermia, I don’t wanna hear you fucking complain to me.” He reclined his chair to forty-five degrees and shut his eyes. The kid has had to hear my awful ramblings for five hours now. How, supposedly, once I found a good lake to skip rocks, that everything would be fixed. I looked at myself again then I looked at him, and at once I was sober. I finished my burger and drove off. The question did not come up again for the rest of the weekend. 

The night’s sleep would proceed to be a gorgeous one but eerie. We settled in Shadmoor State Park’s parking lot. The lot had no lights and only one other car, whose bouncing midnight affair had fogged its windows— illuminating the park in a soft yellow haze that fought Betsy’s maroon brake lights. Expectedly, Holden and I were on edge, inhabited by a New York City-instilled diligence and awareness of our surroundings. A diligence that imagined massive monsters out of hazy shadows and killers in the motors of cars. However, still in us was privileged suburban blood that was aware of the lack of any true danger we were in. This may have been a town whose corners were undusted, but it was also an affluent town that was otherwise empty for the fall season. After a few hours of sitting awake and reclined, we only really began to worry about cops booting us for loitering. Each of us would end up only sleeping for maybe an hour at a time, interrupted by the odd pop of an unmuffled exhaust pipe or tree branch collapse. Holden claimed the back seat to sleep, and I would sleep completely reclined in the driver’s seat (god forbid we would have to make a run for it for whatever reason).

Holden began to brush his teeth, swishing with water from the burger joint, and quickly opened the car door to spit in the gravel. After spitting he didn’t close the door so hastily, though. In fact, he put his toothbrush down and began to wander into the middle of the lot, scaring the other car off and leaving the lot to us.  

“What the fuck are you doing man?” I chased after him, and his feet were planted in the dirt, neck elongated towards heaven. As my pupils adjusted, I could begin to see his eyes, wide as ever, and a kind of smirk hanging off his chin. 

“Josh. Look.” He said softly. 

I pointed my head up, and there it was: the brightest I had ever seen the night sky. Its formation spreading out and smashing into itself like sugar dissolving in coffee. For once, my eyes were open enough; the world was dark enough, to see the colors of the evening. Calm purples and blue rims to each star like spotlights on a stage. Nebulae blotted the sky as if it were some divine Rorschach test; and I saw the answer, it was with you and with Holden and with the angels.

That morning, we woke with stiff necks and sore shoulders, but the sun illuminated what we could only assume against the red haze of our taillights. Gorgeous uniform shrubbery. The sky, heterogeneous. The sun rising and painting the sky a beaten face, pouring pockets of violets and reds out of its pores. Quickly, I threw on a baby blue button up– one that was my Mother’s before me–, and my glasses. With the start of the engine, the whole car rattled and I woke Holden, still sprawled across the backseat. 

“I gotta get a better view of all this!” I yelled, giddy, as I opened the windows. The wind whipped our long hair at our faces, like little shots of espresso waking us. The air, so damn sweet, filled our lungs until I saw Lookout in 200 ft and I hooked right into the cliffside pavement. The lookout welcomed us to the highest, east most, view of the island. We saw all of Montauk spilling into the Atlantic. The shores were calm, and my arms were ready for rocks to be skipped. All lackadaisical, we got ready. I felt fat and happy; watered and pointed towards the sun. We had made it to Montauk, and looking at the rest of the weekend we’d point Betsy due WEST. It was 7:00 AM, and I checked my phone to plan our day. I thought we’d visit the Montauk Lighthouse at the edge of town proper. So, as my phone illuminated for the first time that morning, there was a text sitting from my good friend Gia. A Long Island native, I had forgotten a few days prior to the trip I inquired her as to, “what the fuck is there to do around here.” On my phone, I then held so many possibilities for the weekend and thus so many places: Stony Brook was a dainty college town, Riverhead had delectable produce, or Port Jefferson for coffee, too many to reasonably enjoy in earnest. She replied to my text of thanks that, quite serendipitously, she was also in Long Island. I asked her if we could park Betsy and stay the night in her driveway. “Don’t be a freak, we have a couch,” she replied. Our day became an inch clearer, and we had a place to work till then: Kingspark. 

We brushed our teeth and spat in the bushes, I washed my face with yesterday’s drinking water and propped myself on the lookout’s fence. Holden was sitting in the car, and I motioned him to come and sit aside me. Instead, he climbed on to the fence, and his already tall stature was now cemented a sequoia. Hairs growing pronounced in his neck and in his cheeks, his bandana now refastened framing his eyes and hairline. I could hear his heart beat so loud and saw his arms firmly planted in his pockets. Looking up at him and then back towards the sea, I howled! A quiet one. One that erupted from the falsetto of my neck instead of the meat of my chest. In other words, pathetic. We laughed. 

“It’s cause of the cigarettes” I lied. 

“Sure, it is buddy.” 

There it was, that self-awareness I thought cured me from my sins. Once more I howled— unabashed and unashamed. An empty school bus jet past us and pushed a cool wind, fragrant in gasoline, in our faces and we laughed again. Good morning! The day had just begun. 

We drove into town to get coffee and maybe some food before the lighthouse opened at ten. On the map, the coffee shop was beachfront, so I could ponder around and ruminate a bit; Holden could take some photos. If the tides died down, I thought, I could even do some rock skipping. So, coffees in hand, we patrolled the beach. A young woman yelling at her father, a few fishermen, a dog-walking local, and seagulls populating the empty spaces. The once sweet air turned salty, and the coffee slowly assured our attention. We took a lap around the beach before encountering the young woman from earlier yelling at her father. Except she was alone, sitting on a mound of sand, shivering like a dog. She noticed us ten feet behind her and motioned us to join. We looked behind us to see if we were mistaken, but she motioned again, this time more urgent, before running up to us. Wearing baggy clothes with Shirley Temple curls, her face looked a decade older up close. 

“Hi friends! I’m so sorry, but I really need to get some food. I’m leading in a few hours, and I just really need some cheap food. And I’m leading in an hour. And I have all these emotions I just need to get out! And oh! I lost my hat and I’ve just been running around in circles to get these emotions out! Oh! And I lead! In a few hours!” 

“Hey man, me too.” I said. 

“I love your nails.” She picked up my empty hand to see blue chipping nail polish and bitten cuticles. 

“Thanks.” I looked around, then looked down to my coffee cup and flashed the logo on its sleeve, “It’s kinda expensive, but we got coffee from here. There are a few pastries, and it's about five minutes from the beach entrance?” 

“Okay thanks!” She did not care. “It’s just that I lead in an hour, and I had to swim to get here! And I slept on the beach. And I lost my hat. I just lead in an hour! Bless you both, you handsome boys! Bless you! God bless you both!” 

She ran off with her cobwebs and we headed back to the car. 

“At least the ‘her sleeping on the beach’ part was probably true.” Holden snarked. 

Holden and I briefly discussed, and quickly decided against, about alerting the coffee shop about sending a probably— definitely— crazy-person into their place of business and to act accordingly. Yet she seemed to be a well-intentioned woman of god after all. She already had lost her hat and she had her leading (whatever that meant) in a few hours. She was just having a shit time living and trying to get her emotions out, and hey man, me too. 

Checking the time, it was ripe to go to the lighthouse. The lighthouse was cliffside, a strip of red wrapping around the middle of the structure. As the morning slipped away from us, the clouds began to blanket the sky. With the gloom and crash of the waves, I thought of us like haughty New-England colonists just short of cable knit apparel. The smell of the lush green grass was abundant. The concavity of the cliffs amplified the crash of each wave of water that hit it, turning the rock into sand. With this, I remembered I had promised to call my mother. Looking at the lighthouse, I thought it to be the perfect scenery to surprise her. My mom would see me smiling, and I thought that was exciting. 

“Thought I’d send up a flare!” I yelled at my phone, fighting the wind. My dad was next to her in the frame of the facetime. After overanalyzing the screen for a moment, he jolted his head back from recognition. 

“Oh! You’re at the George Washington Lighthouse.” Apparently, when he first moved us to the states, he had come here on a business retreat. 

“Shit, you know the name too!” 

My mother proceeded to badger us with the expected mother worries and my father left for work before we exchanged the obligatory “I Love You’s.” I hung up the phone and inside the lighthouse we were greeted by tour guides with capital “L,” “Lawng Eyelin’” accents. They gestured towards figurines of the famous boats that have been directed here, demonstrated how the lighthouses’ gears would turn, and they handed children lollipops. For some reason, I was transfixed by the donor board off to the side of the exhibition. A ten-foot by four-foot wooden board with little golden plaques and names tacked on in serif font. Below the names were quotes like epitaphs. As I stared, I couldn’t help but think of my father. I wondered if it made him proud that I was here like he once was, that I was growing into his face— his strong chin and stubble. I wondered if he saw himself in me on the phone. I wondered if he was also scared shitless. Before leaving, Holden and I approached the guestbook: “Holden Casey and Josh Ilano, 10/21/23. NYC.” He followed his signature with “Swagger” and I with “Lisztomania!” 

Kings Park was halfway down the island and Gia said she would meet us at her home around 6pm. The drive to Kings Park would be two hours from Montauk, so I assessed the list of places she gave us from earlier to formulate an agenda.

“We could stop at Riverhead, drive through Stony Brook, and be at her house by 6pm.” I said to Holden, and he was game. 

Between our arrival and departure, the clouds seemed to have stacked on top of eachother and it made the afternoon feel so dark. It begged me to check the weather to the news that we would be receiving several inches of rain over the next few hours. The air was already thick with a cold dew that I had to put on a blue cashmere layer over my collared shirt. In a frenzy to beat the rain induced traffic, we tidied up the car, discarding the past night’s burger wrappers and folded our clothes. As we exited Montauk we only stopped by the local 7-Eleven for an affordable lunch of two-dollar pizzas, chicken sandwiches, and more coffee. As we drove past the beach one last time, Holden poked my shoulder.  

“Hey,” Holden pointed at the lady on the beach, “She found her hat.” 

Riverhead was vast, developed country. A different open-faced market hailed fresh fruit every few miles. Each orchard had accompanying obstacle courses for kids to play in after they picked their apples, and the parents wanted a break. As the rain grew in ferocity, it only permitted a view of the lane macheted by our headlights. I remembered, or told myself, or convinced myself, I had visited one of these establishments from my earliest years. What I did know with certainty was that there were old photos of my family and baskets of apples spilling out of our car. I knew instead of playing in the playgrounds, we’d picnic in the parking lot outside of the orchard, passing around a rice cooker and a Tupperware of cooked spam. However, these images that flashed in my head weren’t just images, the images started to move, and I could feel that fall day as I drove. My boot was on the gas, but I saw my mother through the windshield. I envisioned her hands, before the arthritis, scoop heaps of rice onto a paper plate. I saw my father washing an apple with a bottle of water for me to eat. I felt my mouth fill with saliva, but my back was sweating even more. I could hear the rain get more and more boisterous, but also could feel that fall day. I was sweating so much, our AC did not work, and it was so cold outside.

“Holden, can you drive for a bit?” 

“Yeah, I wanna drive.” 

“Cool.” I pulled over and counted down to three before opening the doors to the rain. As we passed each other, Holden caught me, and embraced me. 

“You’ve been quiet.”

“The music is so loud. And just, I don’t know. Thoughts.” 

“I get that man.” 

“Can we stop to get apples?” 

“Of course, we can, man.” 

At one of those open-faced markets, I got five apples. Holden got two pink ladys and I bought three local varieties. As I checked out, the table beside the cashier had a row of pies whose cellophane lids were still clouded in steam. Gia sounded so excited about Riverhead, in particular, and I imagined how big their smiles would be if I got one for them. So, I bought one blueberry pie, stuck it behind the driver's seat, and buckled it in place. We were going to eat in the car as we usually do, but before sinking our teeth in, Holden stuck his hand through a crack in the car door to expose the apple to the rain. He was washing his apple in the mist; dew drops slowly eating up bits of dirt until they grew so fat that they couldn’t help but fall off. I opened the door and did the same. 

“It’s not much of anything, but better than nothing” he said, wiping the apple on his shirt and I did the same. We sunk our teeth in our apples, and it was the probably best apple I’ve ever eaten. Holden, with it still in his mouth, drove off. 

Long Island suddenly started to grow in length. The fog had grown so thick that the lights of the rare strip mall we’d pass couldn’t even permeate it. The fog was so thick I felt like I could reach out and keep it as a souvenir; the bleeding sky now bandaged. The road was once drenched in this novel beauty, but as the wheels ate more and more road it transformed into every road I had ever driven on. Long Island became Colorado, Sacramento, St. Louis, and the Hudson Valley. The road, all the same, questioned why I would even leave my apartment. Maybe if I closed my eyes enough in my bed, I would feel the same way I would in this car seat. What made it worse, is that I knew that if I stewed long enough in my bed, I could convince myself of anything. 

I looked at the GPS, mapped now to Stony Brook, and I saw an hour and a half left. My eyes were glazing over and becoming unfocused without my glasses on, and I hated that my hands were so free. I could feel every inch of my fingers. The pulse beating on bitten, bleeding hangnails. I started to think about how easy it would be to cut it off by closing it in the window, but all of this felt evil. I knew I had to beat those thoughts out of my head, and I did. I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed all my body weight into my head and pushed it into the window. My lips were muttering, but I wasn’t saying anything. I strangled everything out of my head, until all that was left in there was my father. My father, who often likened such drives at these lengths, to when he would visit my mother. They started dating, working abroad, and they lived in opposite cities across Thailand. I saw him, on lawless road with unreadable road signs, his wingman; a case of cassette tapes in shotgun. I opened my eyes to take out a CD I had bought from earlier and put it in the receiver. If I followed my father’s trajectory, I would do these drives in no more than five years. Yet as I sat, the difference was that there would be no one on the other side of the road on Saturday. That, and Long Island would still be a paper figure. Now I’m trying to beat the thought of my father out of my head. However, I cannot do so without pulling the punches; I do not want to be unkind. So, now I am left with my mother and those thoughts are much more like water. I saw her and me, in my bib, off of her arm, in front of that red door. I opened my eyes once more. On the GPS we were approaching the intersection between the Long Island Expressway and the exit, Northbound to Stony Brook. However Stony Brook, was almost serendipitously positioned at exactly the same longitude of where that house was with the red door. I instructed Holden to urgently turn southbound instead of taking the exit, and he did. I texted my mom for the exact address of our Bellport apartment, and that I would call her an hour, and maybe we could smile. 

“Wow!” She said, bright eyed at the red door through the phone. We parked across the house, and I stretched my arm across the driver’s side to get the best view for her. Familiarly, she pulled out more photos of the house, her, and me. It was the kind of care for a memory I hoped to earn one day. A mature ability to hold sanctity to your memories. It was the kind of grip on a memory that stayed and held your hand just as much as you were holding onto it. We were all smiling, corner to corner of our cheeks. Yet, looking at myself through facetime’s reflected camera, I could see it plainly that mine was a performance. My mother gawked at the monolith that embodied her permitted entry into adulthood and the American Dream. To me, it was a building I slept in at some point. This house held no memories to be uncovered or grand epiphanies to be endured. This house held the same historical profundity as a fun fact. 

I eventually hung up on her and I tasked Holden to switch spots for the rest of the drive to Stony Brook. He obliged, already being so tired at 3pm. Before long, Holden dozed off and allowed me time alone with the road. I was now more than halfway through our trip and my head still felt so loose. These moments of beauty and grandeur simply seemed to be a varnish or lacquer to the gray and unsaturated truths of my psyche. This looseness enabled a spinning, which evolved into a blender of thoughts. My mind pierced each thought so it could bleed into the other. Rendering every question, answer, memory, un-veiled pity, and emotion I was feeling into an incoherent and indistinguishable vomit. It was so loud. The CD I had put in, I bought because it reminded me of a friend that no longer thinks I am cool. The rain’s artillery had since increased. The clouds were no longer bleeding with color, but rather a blanket suffocating a fever out of the sky. Time was eternal and the roads expanse, murderous. My vision started to look as if it were an in-progress watercolor painting; the moving road like the ebb and flow of a too-wet paintbrush. Maybe I could reach out of my eyes and rip away the canvas? No, I couldn't, my hands were on the wheel. Fuck! I need to ground myself. Where was I exactly? I could see smokestacks, maybe two-hundred feet away. Betsy was aching on the pavement, and I had to get to Stony Brook, but my thoughts were racing and in-sync with the brevity of the speed of each raindrop that hit my windshield. The struggle of sorting the incoherency of my thoughts pulled beads of sweat out of my back, and my head grew hot, and the sweat spread to my forehead. 

There is no reason that I should have the ability to yank the narrative out of the corpse that are my memories, yet lack the strength to rationalize any of my prescient thoughts.  I can’t live in the absurdity that— I can use the word “philandry” in the correct etymological context and make you feel bad for a woman that may-not-even-exist in Montauk— but can’t put a single word to why I felt so loose. If I couldn’t turn an emotion into a sentence, then what’s the point? Why am I writing this essay? Am I on the Long Island Expressway right now or am I sitting in my apartment remembering all this for this essay? Or am I catching up with a friend. Or is all of this a message in a bottle, a flare:

‘Cause Jared I miss you and Holden is asleep and I am so worried about myself I don’t want to be someone who lives in his memories but I’m a year into college with no memories to share but the ones with you and I don’t love like I used to when I was 17 and I can’t say it out loud but I spent this money on this car so I could maybe buy a few memories to tell but I’m renting them at best and I’m looking at old photos again and I’m listening to albums I had sworn off and I don’t know why but when do we stop going to our parents for Christmas and does our childhood end when we stop sleeping in their bedrooms?’ 

With a massive smack on the bottom of the car, we hit a pothole, and, after a second of consideration, I let go of the wheel. 

“What the fuck are you doing?!” Holden cried before I quickly put my hands back on. 

“Just checking the axle! Just checking the axle! Don’t worry we’re here.” I comforted. 

“Turn off this sad shit. I don’t wanna open my eyes and you’re being an edge-lord.” He said as he readjusted his seat upright. Holden sized me up and down before looking back out the window to see the sign “Now Entering Stony Brook.” 

“How long have I been out?”
“I don’t know. Forty-five minutes?”
“Sick.” 

“We’ve got maybe an hour and half around here before we’ve gotta be at Gia’s.” I shook the life back into my hands, and shifted my shoulder back instead of hunched over the wheel. “I was just checking the axle.”

Driving through Stony Brook was like living through a life I could have lived. A life I maybe had lusted for one time or another. A sleepy beach town, whose ruckus was mostly instigated by the university it orbited. Satellites of wild youthful action influenced by thoughts that have already been thought. The origin of the culture here seemed unclear, and I liked that. There was a singular deli, with the line out the door, everyone prepared with cash for that night’s dinner. Twenty-nothings were taking the bus, every other person carried a music case: and if not, a novel. We continued to drive around aimlessly, and now a bit more awake, Holden agreed with my diagnosis. We finally talked about how this was a place he could maybe end up with a wife, that it would be a tolerable place to raise a kid or two. How, eventually, he could tell the story of how his sophomore year roommate dragged him out here in the first place. Holden pointed out another sign, “West Meadow Beach in Two Miles.” 

“Hey, you can finally skip your rocks.”

My few quarter turns, I thought. 

As we made our way to the beach, Holden and I didn’t stop conversing. We guessed the mortgage of each white-columned house we passed and joked about how Californians can’t drive (a distinctly Colorado conversation). We talked enough to the point that I didn’t even notice that the rain had subsided into an occasional mist, and eventually into nothing. I parked the car, and stepped outside, it was so warm without the breeze. I changed from my blue sweater into a spare white threadbare. The beach had a playground and an orange structure for the lifeguards. The beach’s sand was much less sand than it was fodder for seashells or a graveyard for freshly shed crab shells. As I peered out to eternity, I was hypnotized by the stillness of the water before me. Staring, the stillness somehow emphasized the rigidity of each microscopic wave, and the sea began to appear closer to TV static rather than water. I picked up a nice smooth rock and just held it in my hands for a moment. The fiery sun was sinking into the ocean’s horizon. I recognized four spires spitting out bounds of white, the smokestacks in the distance. Holden patted me on the back and I grabbed Holden’s shoulder. I wasn’t sweating, and I could really squeeze his shoulder to reveal the bony structure of his body. Holding him, I could affirm that my feet were really set in the dirt, and I dissolved the TV static from my vision. I held up the rock to ask if it was good, and he nodded. I set my shoulder back, curved my wrist, and set that rock for what seemed to be forever. With one big smack on the water, the rock immediately sank. 

Holden laughed, and so did I. I laughed a bit too much, which made him laugh kind of out of concern and courtesy. The water couldn’t have been more still, and we couldn’t have been more lively. The two of us began to scurry, like ants, picking rock after rock and it didn’t even matter if it could feasibly skip. It didn’t matter, we just threw and laughed. Two skips, three skips, five! The beach turned into a chorus of varied ways to exclaim “Watch this!,” “Goddamnit,” and “You throw like a bitch!” 

“Eh’ that was pretty good.” Holden said. 

“Fuck you! Pretty good? That was more than pretty good you bastard!” 

Until finally, our lungs grew heavy and the back of our throats were tart from the laughter. The sun crept halfway through the sea, and it cut the clouds behind us. The clouds, fat or a white sheet; the sun either a razor blade or carving knife. Holden approached a big mound of sand shoveled in the middle of the beach. He climbed and sat upon it, and I did the same. 

“This is so poetic.” I muttered. 

“What?” 

“The clouds behind us, the sun staring at us into our souls, the water the calmest it has been all weekend? I just can’t seem to place the crab shells in all this.” 

Holden leaned back on his arm and stared at the sun as well for a moment. He looked a bit perplexed before jolting forward, a chuckle preluding his thought.

“Look Josh. The past is clouding your future.” He mocked. 

“Fuck you, it’s not that serious.” I joked back. 

“You keep thinking about this trip like its all so fucking poetic and what it means to be young, and blah, blah, blah. But dude. You got a car, and fuck, we’ve gotta place to sleep tonight.” He picked up a rock at his feet and threw it as far as he could, and I did the same. 

When we got to Kings Park, Gia’s mom buzzed us through the gates. Gia called us, fervently apologizing for her tardiness, while I fervently apologized for the inconvenience. We sat in her driveway until her headlights greeted our mirrors. Her boyfriend, Nick, was driving and they were laughing to the music that Gia probably turned on. Through the glass, I saw that she saw me and she waved at us with this massive smile when they put the car into park. As they exited the car, they both radiated the kind of spark between two people that I hadn’t seen in a while, it felt warm and safe. It was a strong enough spark to permeate and feel through the car doors. They said they were celebrating their third, six-month anniversary.

“Well, are you two gonna come in?” Gia asked as we sat in the car, the engine still on. 

“We might get food first.” I said as I rolled down the window. 

“No, no come in first, let’s get you situated!” She instructed and we obliged. 

We brought nothing in except for the pie. Nick was carrying a duffel bag to stay the night, and Gia was asking us plenty of questions about our trip. Gia always introduced her background as “wife-beater-gold-chain-italian,” while Nick’s as “wine-country-italian.” Nevertheless, walking up the patio steps, an ashtray of maybe twenty cigarette butts greeted you. You could hear that there was a big dog muffled by the TV playing the Jets game. The house contained a nostalgic royalty that I did not know I was yearning for and had missed until then. Before even entering through the door, you could tell her mom had a big smile, spouting about five various exclamations of hospitality through the screen. As we took off our shoes, she had her head turned down to see us above her glasses. Her Dad erupted from the basement stairs, and offered his tight grip before getting ready for a night with his buddies. I neurotically threw “sir’s” and “ma’am’s’” at them. I didn’t stop complimenting their house, their daughter, and their daughter’s boyfriend. All of them had the thick “Lawng Eyelin’” accents I had once seen in Montauk, like a clap there had finally reached me. 

“This is Josh, he writes for the newspaper too, and this is his friend Holden.” Gia introduced. 

“Well, it’s nice to meet you both,” She said, gesturing with a limp hand and the other on her hip, “So listen, here's the situation. You can either stay on the couch up here and I’ll make that real nice for you two. But then we got the second option, which is, down in the basement we gotta pull-out couch. Either or, Gianna I’m going to need your help.” She pointed to the cardboard box in my hands, “What’s that?”

“Mom, they got a pie from Riverhead.” 

“No, you boys didn’t!” 

I properly presented the box to her, offering it, the top of it a bit soggy from the condensation. She accepted it, bringing the pie to the kitchen and offering us any coffee. I agreed and took it black, against the behest of Gia. 

“Gia, Ms. Barista, hates it when I make coffee.”

“Josh is a barista too! Josh. Long Islander’s like to burn their coffee so they can taste it with the gallon of milk and sugar they take it with.” Gia said this more to her mom than me.  

She supplied me a cup, and I enjoyed it. Then Gia and Nick interrogated us more with slices of pie now in their hands. 

“What the fuck do you mean you came to Long Island and the only pizza you had was from 7-eleven?” Gia said as she hit Nick on the chest out of surprise. We put our hands up to our ears as if we wanted to claim innocence. 

“No, so if you have time—Gia they gotta go to Pirate’s Cove!—It’s this massive bay and when I was younger me and my buddies would take our sleds there and go down this massive fuckin’ hill. It was so fun.” 

Each time we included a location we had seen, Nick seemed to have an endless rolodex of places and events to anecdote. As we talked about one place, he would talk about what to do in the town next to it and so on, and so on, like a row of dominoes set across the island.

After, we brought our bags from the car and in the basement, and Gia and her Mom prepared the pull-out couch for us. They bickered how daughters and their mothers do. Accusations of putting a sheet on the wrong way despite learning from each other; her Mom making differing slights at the city her daughter left home for. Until finally, Gia went upstairs to get ready for her dinner with Nick, leaving the three of us in the basement. 

“Okay now, you can use the TV right here, we got netflix and all that– one of those smart TV things. And we have four different light switches so you can pick the mood, but if it doesn’t get dark it’s probably because one of them is still on. And listen, I’ll just be upstairs, and I’ll tell the guard at the gate to give you guys a day pass so when you come home from your dinner you don’t have to call again alright? Anything else you want me boys to do? Don’t feel afraid to raid the fridge either, I know eating out has been adding up huh?” Gia’s Mom said as she began to make her way to the stairs. 

“Seriously, thank you ma’am, this is more than enough.” I said, sitting on the now-made-bed. 

“Don’t be shy alright? You boys make yourselves comfortable.” 

“Okay, okay. Alright, I just don’t want to be a burden that’s all” 

“Honey, you can never be a burden.” She ascended the stairs. “Goodnight, boys, I’m going to bed, the door will be unlocked.” 

My memory of the dinner after was a blurry at best, all I could think about was that image of Gia’s Mom. It bounced between my synapses like a tennis ball. Each time I remembered her, I remembered her with a different pitch and different inflection; a version with an intense accent and waning one; her turning off the lights before or after saying“You can never be a burden.” She didn’t even know me. Of course the gesture was out of maternal instinct, and trust in her daughter, but I could burn the house down with the fairy lights that lined our bed as much as I could make breakfast for them in the morning. With two strangers in your home, I thought, each reality was feasible. Yet, she looked at “us boys.” “Us boys,” direly needing a shower and maybe a pat on the back: and gave us a bed, some coffee, and conversation. Even after dinner, laying on that pull-out bed, I stayed awake in my beaten jeans. My eyes were glued to Gia’s cream walls like an endless staring contest. I stayed up until I could hear the garage door open from her Dad’s night out. I heard the clunk of his rubber sneakers hit their shoe rack, followed by barefooted steps into the TV room. Then an ESPN’s announcer’s voice at maximum volume, quickly accompanied by a scramble of more barefooted steps, and finally silence. Then, there was only my beating heart, pulsating the bitten hangnails in my hands and the veins in my forearms. Looking over at Holden, he knotted his limbs around himself under the covers. His mouth was wide open, breathing occasionally besides a faint snore. Quietly, I got up and dug for one of the journals in my backpack. I scribbled a note of gratitude, from “Us boys.” I folded up the piece of paper, and with a dash, I signed “to the Sparacinos.” I set it on the edge of the bed, before I crawled to my side. I turned over, checked Holden one more time, and finally shut my eyes. As I drifted, and lost feeling in my limbs, the walls of my eyelids shifted from maroon to black. From the darkness, I began to find Long Island,  the paper figure slowly stiffening into cement. I felt as if I was granted the clarity to see its firm hand, and I realized that, to shake Long Island’s hand is more than to sit in its dirt, drive on its roads, or skip its rocks. It is to go into their homes, offer them pie, drink their coffee, and call their children gorgeous. It is to breathe in the lingering cigarette smoke and walk into their delis. Anything less is facile tourism, facile performative smiles to neighbors. It’s not just that I shook Long Island’s hand, it’s that I felt its grip was as strong as mine.

Holden and I got up at sunrise to make our journey back to Manhattan, we were reasonable enough to consider traffic this time around. Holden had dinner that night with his aunt in Brooklyn, so I kept the agenda lean. We were to drive, aside, a food stop or two and the occasional scenic drive if given the opportunity. We packed up our things real quiet and reset the bed as Gia and her Mom did. As we left, we saw Gia’s dad sprawled out on the coach, a plate of pie crust on the coffee table in front of him illuminated by a muted TV glow. He heard the creak of the front door, and looked behind him. I mouthed a “Sorry, and thank you,” and he flashed us a smile with a thumbs up. I swiped the water that collected off of Betsy’s windshield overnight, before putting myself behind the driving wheel for the final stretch. At 7:00 am, I sat in the impression of my body that Betsy’s leather had developed since Thursday. I realized that this car began to form around me like all the cars of my past. That notion instilled a dread that was bent towards the finality of our impending pavement.

Although I felt I had begun to know Long Island, it is not as if I knew the Manhattan I was driving back to. Back on the LIE, fifty minutes out of Hempstead, New York City began to reappear to us. Long Island disappeared into Queens and the sun began to get dragged into the west. We were forty-five minutes away from home, and the sun was setting against us. Inbound east, the sun was positioned in the sky in a way that eclipsed the buildings. With the skyscrapers blackened, the skyline’s silhouette looked just as grand as the Rocky mountains. 

It looked like an old photograph, and for once I was fine with that. I was happy about that. I knew I wasn’t driving to Jared, I knew that I didn’t love like I used to when I was 17, and I knew that I was playing the album from that friend that doesn’t think I’m cool anymore. However, to beat all those memories out of me, is to kill a part of me. Those moments are still alive and twitching, no matter how inconsequential or tart those experiences are. To feel as if I had to punish myself for turning off those emotions, is to rob myself of any sanctity or grace. In life, especially growth, tragedy, pain, love, and even death: I am Jared and I am the friend that doesn’t think I am cool anymore; just as much as I am my mother and father, or my friends on Fulton street, or my failed loves, or my ornament-headed college peers. My head was still loose, but it also will never be properly fastened. When I parked Betsy in Queens and took the train back to Manhattan with Holden, I began to see that, allowing myself— permitting myself compassion for once— allowed me to coexist with my regrets, that the grief in my discontent is okay. There will be a quarter turn in every handshake I give to my friend’s fathers, in every phone call from my mother, in every time my friends check up on me; to tell me that they love me because I have been crying so much. I may not love like I used to when I was 17, but Holden was here, and I do love him and that is a kind of love I can shake hands with. Him, here, holding each other’s hate when things get too loud. And that itself is far more than a few quarter turns, it has kept my head screwed on straight. 

Epilogue

By the time we got to our apartment, Holden hastily got ready for his dinner. We stared in the bathroom mirror. His bandana stained with dirt, and my denim jacket weathered, and our faces looked so damn grizzly. He opened the cabinet, getting his razor to shave, and I did the same.