Pickup
I know I’ve been long in threatening you with the details: I was in Racine for Christmas. It was the first time in a while that either my mother or sister had invited me back. I had no particular reason to want to go, but I had one particular reason to do it anyway: it was a good excuse to avoid the holidays with Erica, which she seemed to be hinting at, but which seemed too intense for me right at the moment. I pretended not to pick up on it, and god knows where she went for Christmas.
Not that life, on another hand, was carefree with the old family. After getting settled in my mother’s guest room, I conned the car keys out of her, just like the old days, under pretense of picking up her groceries. So it was only an hour or two in the familial glow before I was out on the road again.
I don’t really like to drive. It makes me nervous. It’s too big a responsibility. But driving the car into town felt as liberating as driving a car is supposed to feel, especially when you are sixteen and escaping the parental view, as I now was again. I made the drive into Racine proper and parked for a while by the park by the lake, reflecting on how Lake Michigan was sort of like the East River, except instead of floating mob hits it contained mostly bits of Canada. All the bars were different from when I was a kid, or most of them, and anyway, you had to think differently when you were drinking in the town where your mother knew people. I wasn’t sure how it was done. I had never had a public, legal drink in the town where I grew up.
I headed up Wisconsin Avenue to see what my options were. I needed someplace reasonably similar to a dark, honest bar where I could take a few moments to figure out how I was going to get through these next days. Mostly I saw laundromats, video stores, and other businesses that, while perhaps necessary to the local community, were unwelcome distractions that I clocked off interminably. Then I saw a storefront with a Miller High Life sign glowing like a secret handshake. My car slowed. In front of the bar was parked a small, lime green pickup truck. On the door of the pickup truck was a carefully-crafted decal of the same truck. It was depicted leaping from an explosion of fire. This was the first time I had seen a truck celebrated in this way: on the truck. I wanted to park near that truck, and I did. When I walked around it, I saw that the opposite door had a different scene (in which the truck careened down a rocky pass, heading towards a deer, which has only just begun to be aware of its situation), and that these both were only introductory to the final and possibly greatest image of the triptych, applied to the truck’s hood. Here the truck was featured at its most heroic, bursting through a wall of stone and aimed, much like the real truck, right at you. The fact that the owner of this illustrated truck was probably drinking in the bar made me want to drink in that bar. I went in.
TO BE CONTINUED….
by Jack, March 3, 2005 11:27 AM | More from Drinking
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