American Outlaw - Jesse James [135]
I turned the key in the ignition, and tore away from the lot.
“Yo man!” called out the paparazzo after me, puzzled. “Why you tripping?”
——
I drove endlessly in circles around Long Beach, and for once, no cars followed me. But I still felt completely defeated and undone.
As I orbited the blocks so familiar to me from my childhood and youth, I passed high schools, gas stations, strip joints, taco stands, and auto parts stores. None of them were open to me now. Everyone knew about me. Everyone hated me.
I drove on, faster now, drumming on the dash with my fingertips, feeling light-headed, like I was ready to take a chance, do something rash. By coincidence, I passed the black church that I’d found years before. Immediately, I pulled into the parking lot.
Maybe this spot is the answer, I thought. Maybe I can talk to someone—that preacher. Maybe he’ll listen to my story.
I made my way up the walk and pounded on the front door.
“Hey,” I called out desperately. “Is anybody there? Hello?”
But the door was locked. Panicked, I knocked louder and louder, again and again, slamming the flat of my hand heavily against the wooden frame of the door.
“Hey!” I said. “Come on! Open up!”
“Yo,” a homeless guy passing by said to me. “Nobody home.”
“I can see that,” I muttered.
“No, they moved. They went to Compton about a year ago,” he said. “Not enough black folks in Long Beach for a congregation anymore.”
I said nothing for a moment. Then, dejected, I began to walk back to my truck. There would be no salvation for Jesse James. Not today.
I sat behind the wheel of my truck, my head spinning. There had to be a solution, a place I could go to get away. But no clear answers came.
If only I could escape, I thought frantically. If only I could go somewhere and leave this fucking horrible mess behind.
Nothing came to me, so I drove home. I had no other place else to go. But I felt like a trapped animal in a cage there, too.
I couldn’t turn on the TV. I couldn’t read the newspaper. I couldn’t go to work.
And then somewhere, amid my panic and distress, I remembered a friend of mine telling me, years before, about a rehab facility he’d gone to in Arizona called Sierra Tucson.
“It’s an amazing place,” he’d said. “It turned me right around.”
With trembling fingers, I turned on my computer and found the website of the facility. I scrawled the address down on a piece of paper. It would be a five-hundred-mile drive from Long Beach to Tucson—a grueling, narrow journey down the I-10. But I knew I had to go there.
Because if I don’t, I thought, something terrible is going to happen. And soon.
18
Blue-black light hung on the horizon as I throttled down the I-10, the vibrations of the tires and the frame tranquilizing my wrecked mind.
I’m finally going somewhere, I thought. I’m finally getting out of this hell-zone.
It was four o’clock in the morning.
I pressed harder on the accelerator, watching my speed increase to 120 miles an hour, then 130, then higher. The industrial shitscape of Los Angeles gave way to something even bleaker as I passed out of lonely Riverside into the wide-open range of horse stables and twisted trees and spinning giant wind turbines outside of Indio. In the back of my mind, I remembered a carefree, drunken trip I’d taken once many years before on the same route . . . heading to a spring break party at Lake Havasu . . . the car full of delirious teens, everyone smoking and yelling . . . Hey, don’t you know what all those wind turbines are for, man? someone said, coughing, they suck all the smog out of Los Angeles—and then the trusting expression of one of the girls we’d brought along—Really?
Onward I drove, scenery melting, now dust, now desert, now mountains, and I ripped along the empty roadway through the breaking light of dawn, the blues and blacks rising into something