Road Trip

I just did an up-and-back from Myrtle Beach to Charlotte. It’s about four hours, but practically none of it is on highways. 20% of homes in South Carolina are mobile, and most of them are on this route. Lots of churches and a couple of prisons. A town, Bennettsville, where the per capita income is $10,000 a year. Michael Jordan’s father was killed there, at a gas station. I don’t stop in Bennettsville, unless I’m hungry for a bag of Rap Snacks. For a good time, google that.

I used to not be a big fan of long drives. After all, I grew up in Connecticut, and you can drive from one side of the state to the other in two hours. You can pass through five different states in three hours. Growing up, I never went more than 20 minutes in either direction. Going to the Crystal Mall in Waterford was an adventure. I lived 20 minutes from Rhode Island, and only went there a handful of times. Everything is smaller in the North. Elsewhere in the country, shit is really far apart. My rich friends from New York often ask me if I know so-and-so from South Carolina. “Where does he live?” I ask. “Hilton Head,” they reply. That’s like three and a half hours from me, I say. Well, they say, maybe you can get together. I’m like, dude, that’s like me saying you should get together with someone in New Hampshire. People just do not get how big everything is in the South. And I’m not even from Texas.

Now, I do long drives pretty routinely. Charlotte is four hours, Raleigh three-and-a-half. Savannah is four. Atlanta is six. When I was getting my tattoos, I made five trips back and forth to Atlanta. Asheville is six hours, too. Anything further than that is a flight, though I did drive from Birmingham, Alabama to Myrtle Beach one time. That was eight hours. No fun.

Still, when you’re going for a long drive, technology allows you to be more productive. I go through the Rolodex on my phone and start calling people. I call friends and colleagues and people I haven’t talked to in ages. I can take a trip to Charlotte and be on the phone pretty much the whole time. It makes the time go by faster, and you can get a lot of business done that way. I also bring the iPod and listen to tunes, catching up on the latest progressive house. Some people listen to podcasts. I’m not really a podcast guy—I listened to an hour of a Joe Rogan podcast on UFOs one time and that was enough for me.

I am something of a connoisseur of gas stations—some are better than others. South Carolina does not have great gas stations, nothing like Sheetz or Wawa in Pennsylvania. There are what I call fleabag gas stations. You might find this hard to believe, but you can still find these one-pump gas stations out in the country that still have the analog readout on the pump like you used to see forty years ago. Basically, I am just looking for a pisser, and maybe a gas station hot dog and an Arizona iced tea. Don’t knock the gas station hot dogs. At $1.50, it’s the best value around, and no, I have never gotten sick from a gas station hot dog. You just grab it off the greasy roller things with the tongs, get a bun out of the drawer with the plastic wrapper—so good. I get two at a clip. The Arizona Iced Tea will make me have to piss in an hour. I am coming up on 50 years old, so I have this thing where one minute, I will be fine, and the next minute, I will have an uncontrollable urge to pee. Like, I gotta pee now. If I’m not near a gas station, the act must necessarily be done in the car. I usually have some cans and cups rolling around, so I have options. Ideally, I’ll have a large Dunkin Donuts iced coffee cup, which is easy enough to aim into, but then the piss is sloshing all over the cup as I’m swerving and going over bumps, and I pee all over my hands. Then I have a cup of pee sitting in the center console, until I can stop at a light where I can pour it out on the pavement. A Gatorade bottle is perhaps a better option, though a little more difficult to aim, but at least you can screw the cap on it so you don’t have steaming piss stinking up the car. But there’s been some shrinkage in Gatorade bottles lately, so now I run the risk of filling it to the top and having some left over, and having to pinch it off. My last choice would be an empty soda can, but that takes real skill, and if the drive is long enough, you’ll forget you have a soda can full of pee in the center console, and you’ll drink it. Note—I have done this, but it’s sterile and I like the taste. I don’t know how women do it. Drive without peeing, I mean. Out in the country, you can go 60 miles between gas stations. I mean, truckers do this, right? They probably drain the lizard once an hour. They’re not stopping at the Flying J to take a wee-wee. If I didn’t have the ability to go in a cup or a can, I would literally piss my pants, something I’ve done only once in the last 15 years, in an elevator in New York City. Long story.

I’ve done longer drives. In 1996, I drove cross-country from Connecticut to Washington State. That trip took nine days. It was on that trip that I stayed at the cheapest hotel I’ve stayed in my entire life—a $15 room in Rawlins, Wyoming. My favorite part of the drive was Western Nebraska, around Scottsbluff. Some of the most beautiful terrain I’ve seen in the world, anywhere, but for the most part, I-80 is a slog. I was driving a Toyota Tercel at the time, filled with all my possessions. Five years later, I made the trip back East, from San Francisco to New York. This time, I had a cat. Otto was a mutt Burmese rescue who actually liked riding in the car. He’d calmly sit in the back seat, looking out the windows, just hanging out. That trip we made in two days, so as to minimize the stress on the cat. Drove 24 hours from San Francisco to Kearney, Nebraska, stayed in a motel, and then drove 24 hours to New York the following day. I don’t recommend traversing the United States in 48 hours. There’s no earthly way I could go across country with seven cats—about an hour is all they can handle. If I really had to take the cats somewhere, private air travel would be the only option.

As for long flights, I’m actually not that well-traveled—been to Europe a handful of times, South America once, and never to Asia. I’ve never taken an 18-hour flight. My record long flight is 12 hours, from Buenos Aires to DFW. As you probably know, the cabin is pressurized to 8,000 feet, which means that I can’t sleep on planes—I can’t handle the altitude. I’m awake the entire time. Usually I just work, but I have watched the occasional movie, and I was surprised to find that movies on planes these days aren’t edited. I was sitting there watching the rape scene of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, looking around, wondering if anyone was looking at my screen. After doing a couple of 10-12 hour flights, a cross-country flight from Charlotte to Los Angeles is nothing now. I can stare off into space for five hours. I will say that there is nothing more anti-social than taking a mind-blowing dump on a plane, when you so desecrate the side of the toilet that seven loud suction-flushes can’t conceal the damage. You’re just hoping that nobody is waiting outside to use the lavatory, and you can slink back to your seat in relative anonymity. Sidebar: just two weeks ago, on the way back from Vegas, the guy behind me got really drunk and decided to burn one in the bathroom. The flight attendants did not have a sense of humor about it.

A lot of time is wasted in transportation. That’s why I was rooting for Elon Musk to build the Hyperloop, though that turned out to be bullshit. Travel at the speed of sound in a tube? Sounds like huge amounts of fun. We’re also revisiting the idea of supersonic air travel, though in the beginning, that is going to be for Richie Rich. Americans think nothing of getting in the car and driving for eight hours, but it’s boring and dangerous and a huge waste of time. There is one other thing you can do while driving—rough up the suspect. I know a trucker, and he said that you would be shocked at the number of people who masturbate while driving. Women, too. As long as you keep one hand on the wheel, I suppose.