The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [116]
It’s important to note that Simone didn’t ask Nonno Marcello for money, it came as a surprise when he offered. We could have made payments. On average, it cost us ninety dollars a month to rent a space for our Hitchhiker. We were making between four and five thousand dollars a month and our bank account seemed to be piling up fast. We took gaps of time between outages to do fun things: go to Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons, stop in Laughlin, Nevada to stay at a hotel and swim, or head to SeaWorld in San Diego.
I remember our Hitchhiker now—can see it clearly in my mind—especially the way it looked while it was hooked up and towed like an obedient, oversize pet. Especially since much of my time was spent following Simone in the Isuzu I-mark my father bought me for my first year away at college. I remember its giant body sliding back and forth on icy mountain passes, perilous as a scene from The Long, Long Trailer, Simone as Desi Arnaz. I waved and directed Simone back into tight spaces when we visited majestic forests and beaches. It had a wood window one winter; we wanted to order a new one but were moving from outage to outage so often that there was never a stable address for the Nuway factory to ship the part. There was a sun roof in the bathroom where I looked up at night when I stepped out of the shower and saw stars.
I bent a gas pump over (they are surprisingly flexible) one time in the middle of the night at a Giant station in Bernallilo County, coming off of Insterstate 17 south of Santa Fe, across the street from a Lotta Burger. Simone was asleep in the upstairs bedroom when he heard the screech of metal. We had been driving all night from New Orleans and he was tired. I turned too sharply as I entered the gas station and the Hitchhiker rubbed up against the pump. The truck and the Hitchhiker sat jack-knifed together at a severe angle and I could see Simone clearly from the driver’s seat of the truck, since the cab and the rear were bent close. He pulled back the bedroom curtain, his eyes humongous and staring as he saw what I had done. Nothing exploded. He simply came to me, slipped behind the driver’s seat, pushed me out of the way, and backed us up. The gas pump returned to its normal position.
Simone says Nonno simply offered the eight million lira because he wanted to help us out, to reach out and be kind—remarkable since the lifestyle Simone was living was completely out of order with his wishes for us and his sensibilities in general. It hurt him that Simone had rejected the grand houses, the fur-coated women, the Mercedes Benz lifestyle, in order to wander around with me, our expanding family, and a gang of migrant Navajo welders. It hurt him that English was dominating Simone’s life. Simone was in fact learning English well, with a beautiful Milanese accent, though every once in a while, on certain words, I heard a slight hint of Navajo accent slip in.
Not everyone associates Recreational Vehicles with nature, an experience of freedom, or a way to break away from stiff societal standards. Take my friend, Jonathan, for example, when I asked him what he associated Recreational Vehicle’s with he said, “Meth labs.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. In the Midwest they’re used as meth labs, I saw an article in the River Front Times.”
“How odd. I guess it makes sense. What else?”
“FEMA trailers for Hurricane relief…”
“That’s right…how depressing.”
“Oh, and Warren Oates, the B movie actor…”
Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, and Loretta Switt—the actress who played Hot Lips in the television series M*A*S*H—starred in Race with the Devil, a 1975 horror flick with humorous elements. They play a group of friends headed for a ski trip in Aspen in their Winnebago. While camping in Texas they accidentally witness a crime, a killing, a human sacrifice by cult members. For the