I normally drive this route at night, so I’m surprised at how congested it is during the day. So many cars that it’s hard to drive as fast as the posted 75, let alone the 90 I usually drive at on such trips. 
The drive from Phoenix to Santa Fe normally takes eight hours, but the storm is going to make it take longer this time. 
As I drive, I’m listening to a tape. Old time country songs, written by Jimmie Rodgers, the singing brakeman. It was given to me by Dave. He recorded a Japanese guy in San Francisco a few years ago. The guy worked as a tour guide, showing people around the city, and performing at open mic nights as a hobby. Dave recorded him and wanted to try to get him a record deal, but the guy wasn’t interested. He just wanted a copy of the tape to give to his wife. Dave hasn’t seen him in years, and has no idea what became of him. 
I drive through the rain and listen to him sing. You could laugh at the mix of American vernacular and thick Japanese accent (“Sa-aay-dee, my little la-aaydee...”), but I don’t. The guy isn’t funny, nor is he trying to be. I can tell that he feels these songs, loves their grimy melancholy. His voice is pained, sincere. 

The tape is perfect for this journey. 
I don’t like to travel, though I travel more often than most of the people I know. I travel for work, and to visit friends, but the traveling is a necessary hardship I endure in order to get the story or see the friend. 
But today I understand why some people respond to a crisis by getting on the road. At the start of this trip, I was so worried about money that I was close to being depressed. I have so little money in the bank - and no money coming in - that I can’t really afford the cost of the gas for this trip. But now the worry has disappeared. Sitting here in a big Lincoln Town Car, edging along a crowded rural highway, the country song playing, I’m content. I know I will somehow find the money to make rent. I feel as though nothing bad can reach me right now, though I know that’s not true. And, though I love Amy and love being at home with her, I also love this highway with its diners and service stations and towns with the possibility of an intense, romantic and meaningless fuck with some woman whose last name I won’t know and who I’ll never see again but always remember. 

The 17 just south of Sedona is where the car I was driving broke down as I headed for Las Vegas to research a story. It was around nine o’clock in the evening, and it was dark. I got out of the car and started walking. A sign said that the exit to Sedona was up ahead. I thought that meant Sedona would be right there, with a gas station near the exit ramp, and I’d be able to call AAA. I didn’t know there was twenty miles of nothing between the exit and Sedona. 
The exit didn’t seem to be very close by, either. I walked for about a half-hour, and didn’t reach it. One car stopped, but - for some reason I can’t explain, which probably means no reason at all - I wasn’t sure that it had stopped for me, and so I walked right past it. God knows what the driver thought. A minute later, I was cursing my stupidity. 

Finally, another car stopped for me. The driver’s name was Penny, and she was in her early thirties and had a Texas accent. She told me she had driven past me a while ago, deciding that it would be risky to stop and pick up a man on a dark road when she was on her own. But then she’d started thinking about what might happen to me if nobody stopped. So she got off the highway, turned around and got back on, going south. She drove for a few miles and then started going north again, until she found me. 
We were halfway to Sedona when I was struck by an awful realization. “Listen,” I said. “I left my wallet in my car. It’s got my AAA card in it. I know this is asking a lot, but could you take me back to the car so I can get it?” 
“Sure,” she said easily. 

We went back and got the wallet. She told me she’d been gambling at the casino on the Camp Verde Indian reservation, and was now heading to Holbrook, where she lived, a hundred and fifty miles away. We drove to the Village of Oak Creek and I called AAA. They sent a guy out, he took me to my car and fixed it, warning me to take it to an auto-shop the next day before trying to drive it the rest of the way to Vegas. I drove to the Oak Creek Tavern, where Penny was waiting for me. We drank beer and played pool with a couple of guys in the bar. She appeared to have abandoned her plan to drive home to Holbrook. When the bar closed, we got in her car, leaving mine in the parking lot. We drove around Sedona, looking for a hotel. Few had vacancies, and the ones that did were beyond my budget. She said there were some cheap ones at the casino in Camp Verde. We drove there and she turned out to be right. 
The next morning she drove me back to my car and we said goodbye. I took the car to an autoshop, got it fixed, and spent the day driving to Vegas. I talked to a man who lived in a boxing gymnasium and thought he was going to become a world champion. I think he believed what he was saying. But he hadn’t had a professional fight, and his coach told me he had no ability. 

I like this car I’m driving. I’ve driven this route in far worse. The first time, about three years ago, I had a twenty-year-old Oldsmobile with no heating, and I had bought it from a dying man. It was a couple of days before New Year. I drove overnight, and, by the time I reached Gallup, New Mexico, I could not feel my feet at all. I stopped the car, got an extra pair of socks out of my bag, took off my boots (it took a while for my numb fingers to undo the laces) and pulled the socks on over the ones I was already wearing. This helped a little, but not much. Just as I reached my destination, the car nearly went off the road. There was a problem with one of the wheels - the mechanic I took it to told me that if I’d driven it much farther, the wheel would have fallen off. 
I was there for the same reason I always go there - to visit Ken and Chrissie. In the ten years I have known them, they have become family. They are both visual artists. They have been married for more than twenty years, and have a daughter, Rowan, who now lives in New York City. They bought some land in Cerrillos - a village about thirty miles east of Santa Fe - back when it was cheap. Ken planned to build a house, and they’d live in a trailer while he did. It didn’t turn out exactly that way; he kept building extensions to the trailer, until it had become a wooden house and there was nothing to indicate what it once had been. The place is really a giant sculpture, a work of art you can live in, with huge windows and no lock on the door. Ken built a studio just outside, and a coop for chickens, which they kept as pets, not for food. 

Even tougher than that first drive out there was the drive back to Phoenix. I got my car back from the mechanic, a belligerent man named Don who lived in the village. (When I took the car to him, before I could say a word he looked at it and said, “Piece of shit.”) It now seemed to be running okay, but there was a menacing snowstorm, and Chrissie was worried and wanted me to stay until it was over. There was work waiting for me in Phoenix, and I was afraid that if I stayed in Cerrillos any longer I might get snowed in. Chrissie gave me a blanket and a thermos full of ginger tea. I got on the road in the early evening, and drove until I had left the worst of the snow behind. I stopped in a Denny’s in some little town whose name I’ve forgotten. I just intended to eat something quickly and then carry on driving, but I was so cold and the place was so warm. I ate a waffle with strawberries and bacon, then sat there for a couple hours, drinking milky tea and reading a trashy horror novel. Finally I paid my bill and went outside to the frozen darkness. I got in my car, wrapped the blanket around me and poured a cup from the thermos and started the car. 

The car had no tape player, only a radio, and for much of the journey it was hard to find a station that I could pick up for long. The sun came up about an hour before I reached Phoenix. When I rolled into town, the freeways were busy with people on their way to work. I drove into my apartment complex, and everything was quiet. I got the mail that had gathered, then let myself into my small apartment. I’ve heard people complaining about how depressing it is, when you live alone, to return to a cold, empty apartment, no sign of life there since you left. But I loved the feeling that morning, the coldness in the air of the apartment, everything as I had left it. I threw my bag on the floor; I would unpack it later. I turned on the heating, and listened to the messages on my answering machine as I took my clothes off. There was no bad news. I got into bed and was glad. 

Three years later. A different car, and a different time of year. It’s early September, and far from cold. Other things have changed, too. Ken and Chrissie are no longer together. 

Their marriage was always turbulent. When I met Ken, they had separated, and he was living in exile in Scotland and trying to figure out what came next. Chrissie was living with Rowan in Cerrillos. Ken flew to New Mexico to talk to them and reach some decisions. They decided to try to stay together. 
That lasted for some years, but never without difficulty. Ken got a job touring around the country in a van, giving demonstrations of chalk-drawing in schools. They both seemed happy with the situation, Ken with being on the road, and Chrissie being by herself. When that job was over, things got difficult. I went to visit them, and found Ken so depressed that he was unable to do anything, and Chrissie didn’t know what to do for him. She told him to leave, and he did. He got in his van and just wandered around. In different cities, he tried to get publishers to publish his artwork, and tried to get municipal authorities to commission work from him, but he got nowhere with either. He came to Phoenix for a few days, and seemed in better spirits than I had seen him in a long while. He had a companion in the van, a new dog he’d named “Little Pal.” He was drawing, and writing poems. He spent some years in Phoenix as a teenager, and went to Phoenix College. We spent some time driving around, him telling me how much the city had changed since then. I asked him what was going to happen with him and Chrissie, and he said he didn’t know. 

At night, he parked his van outside our apartment. He slept in the van with his dog. He could have slept on our couch, but I understood why he slept in the van. It had a bed, and all the rest of his stuff, and was pretty much his home. 
One night, Amy and I took him to Newman’s, a flophouse dive bar on Monroe Street in downtown Phoenix. A guy tried to start a fight with him. We left the bar without any punches being thrown, but Ken was upset by it. We went to another bar, a slightly more upmarket place, but there must have been something in the air that night, because a guy tried to shove me into the urinal while I was taking a piss. When I turned and confronted him, he backed off and acted so innocent that I have wondered since then if I confronted the wrong guy. When the bar closed we went back to the apartment, and Ken and I got drunk and talked until very late. Eventually I went to bed, and he went outside to his van. 

In the morning he was gone. Amy found an envelope stuck to our front door. It contained some poems, and a note saying he had decided to take off. 
He decided to go visit a friend in Scotland. Chrissie had moved out of the house and was staying at a friend’s place in Santa Fe. Ken rented the house to a couple he knew, gave it to them cheap on the condition that they took care of his animals, which they did. 
Scotland held too many memories for him. He wanted to quit drinking, and the country has as alcoholic a culture as you’ll find anywhere in the world. So he headed for Corsica, where he’d once lived for a few years. Not long after he arrived, he was sitting in a quiet spot, playing his guitar. He got so into it that he closed his eyes and forgot his surroundings. When he opened his eyes, he saw a young man and woman in front of him. The woman was giving the man a blow job. Ken was about to stand up and leave, when he realized that she was bobbing her head in time with the rhythm of his guitar playing. He was tempted to start varying the tempo wildly, but he didn’t. He just kept playing, bemused and a little aroused. 

Chrissie is still living at her friend’s house in town. She’s told me that she doesn’t want to get back together with Ken.  Ken is staying at the house in Cerrillos. He returned from Corsica a couple weeks ago, flying into New York to see Rowan. Then he rented a car, and he and Rowan drove for a week until they reached New Mexico. Rowan will be there for another few days, then she goes back to New York. 

Chrissie is having a party tonight, a birthday party for a friend of hers, whom I also know. Rowan will be there - she’s staying with Chrissie - and Ken will probably be there. Rowan told me all this when I talked with her on the phone this morning before I left Phoenix. I told her I’d probably get there at around eight, but it’s after ten when I pull into town. I have the address of Chrissie’s place, but I don’t know where it is. I drive to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, a bar on Guadalupe Street I’ve been going to for years. There’s a band playing and there’s a cover charge to get in, so I find a payphone out in the street and call Chrissie’s number. I get an answering machine. 

“Hey, it’s Barry. I just got into town. I’m at the Cowgirl. I hope the party’s not over already. Send Rowan to get me, and I’ll follow her to your place. See you soon, I hope.” 

I stand around in the street for about fifteen minutes. The Cowgirl is packed, even on the patio area. I go back to the payphone and dial another number, a name from my past, Helen. She picks up the phone, and I tell her I’m in town. I haven’t seen her in a couple years. She sounds glad to hear from me. I ask her if she’d like to meet me for a beer at the Cowgirl. She says she can’t, she’s tired, she has to work in the morning, but she’d like to see me before I leave. I say that’s good, I’ll call her tomorrow. 

Still no sign of Rowan. I decide to pay the cover and go into the bar. I hang out and listen to the band for maybe an hour. There’s hardly room to breathe. The customers, as always with this place, are a bizarre mix - the rich white New Age artists who have taken over the town, punkers from the Aztec Cafe round the corner, rednecks, kids. I don’t see anybody I know, which surprises me. I try calling Chrissie again, and still get no answer. So I call Ken, and he’s home. He tells me the party is probably still going on, but that Chrissie and her friends are probably out on the porch and can’t hear the phone. He was at the party earlier, but didn’t stay very long. He tells me to come out to his house if I can’t find the party. I say okay, and failing that I’ll see him tomorrow. 
I ask a guy in the bar where Acacia Madre Street is, and he gives me vague directions. I leave the bar, get in my car and drive around for a while but don’t find it. Then a white car flashes its lights at me, and pulls up beside me. I don’t recognize the driver, but the passenger is Rowan. 
I follow her to Chrissie’s place, and leave my car there. The party is over, and Chrissie is about to go to bed. She and I hug each other, and say we’ll see each other in the morning. Rowan suggests a club. I agree, and we go to one in her friend’s car. It’s at the Paramount, but it’s almost dead, so we decide to head back to the Cowgirl, and we stay until it closes. 

I think Rowan was about twelve when I first met her, a tiny, shy girl with long red hair. Now she’s twenty-one. She’s not much bigger, but the hair is short and the shyness is gone. When she tells me about her life in New York, I have a ridiculous “big brother” reaction - an impulse to say, “You can’t do stuff like that, you’re too young...” This is an impulse I resist. 

Rowan sleeps in the bedroom with Chrissie. I sleep on the couch in the living room. Chrissie teaches art to young men and women who are incarcerated in a detention center. Two of the cushions on the couch were made by them. One has a drawing of the Virgin of Guadalupe on it. The other is illustrated with an avalanche of scenes from la vida loca. There is a note attached to that cushion: “My name is Dominique and I love to draw. I’m 17 and have been in prisons for as long as I can remember. My drawing is the story of my life...” 
In the morning I ask Chrissie about the kid, who he is, what his story really is. She points at the cushion. “Like he said, that’s his story right there.” 

Chrissie and I go down to the Aztec Cafe. I’ve never been there so early in the morning, and I’m struck by how different it seems. It’s the town’s primary - some would say only - punker hangout. By the afternoon, the clientele will be mostly young, and will stay until the place closes, then move to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. But now, at just after eight in the morning, the crowd is older, more clean and pressed, people stopping for breakfast on the way to the offices or galleries where they work. 

Like her daughter, Chrissie is small and thin. Unlike Rowan, who is laid back sometimes to the point of narcolepsy, Chrissie seems almost to crackle with a kind of manic energy. She’s in her forties, with sun-browned skin and blonde hair. She was born and grew up in Scotland, but you’d never know it from her accent. More than twenty years of marriage to an American, and ten years of living in New Mexico, have eradicated Scotland from her body and speech. 
I can see the process of separating from Ken going on in Chrissie. She doesn’t seem to want to talk about him much, or hear about him. She tells me that her life feels beyond her control, that she doesn’t know what will come next. She and Ken still haven’t discussed what to do with their house and land, and she doesn’t know what she’ll do when the house she’s living in is sold, or when the owner dies, which will be soon. She’s living there rent-free, which is the only reason she’s managing to pay the rent on the studio she’s working in. She may leave the state for a while; she has an offer of a job in Georgia, as a community artist, but she isn’t sure what to do about it, or about anything else. I don’t say much, just listen, tell her she’ll be okay, that things will work themselves out. 

We go back to her temporary home. Rowan is awake, and asks me if I want to go to a club that night. I say yes. Chrissie would like to go, but she has to visit the owner of the house tonight. The woman is dying rapidly of cancer. She’s in her sixties, and realized very late in life that she was a lesbian. She met the woman she considers to be the love of her life - who’s in her seventies - and they’ve been together for less than a year. She feels cheated that the happiness they’ve found together is going to be cut short. It wasn’t easy to get the doctors to give her a prognosis. When she finally demanded one, she was told that she had between one month and two. They had scheduled her for chemotherapy, but when they admitted that it probably wouldn’t work, she decided not to put herself through it. Tonight she’s sending her girlfriend to the opera, figuring she could use a break from taking care of her, so Chrissie’s going over to sit with her. 

In the early evening, I’m walking in the door of the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and Helen is walking out. She went there to look for me. She knew it was a fairly safe bet I’d be there, if I was anywhere - there’s really nowhere else to go in town. When she sees me, she grins hugely and her arms go around my neck and I feel the warmth of her. 

The last time I saw her was on a trip I made at New Year. Since moving to the US, I’ve spent every New Year with Ken and Chrissie. On that particular New Year’s Day, I woke up in Ken’s van, with him and Chrissie. We had gone to a party in town, and we had all been too drunk to drive back to Cerrillos, so we’d slept in the van outside the house where the party had been. When we woke, Chrissie found that her boots were full of something wet, and accused Ken of drunkenly pissing in them during the night. Ken denied it, and accused me of doing it. I was innocent, and said so. I’m still not sure which of us Chrissie believes, or if she believes either of us. 

We drove to Cerrillos. The roads were icy, and snow was coming down. When we got to the house, Ken lit the wood stove, the only source of heat. We were all tired. We sat around and talked, watched TV, ate an early dinner. We heard news of people going off the road in the snow and ice. Ken and Chrissie went to bed early, but I began to wake up. I read for a while, but I was in the mood to do something. It was about ten o’clock. I considered driving into town. I looked out of the window. It was pitch dark, and the snow was still falling. I didn’t want to make the thirty-mile trip if there wasn’t going to be anything happening, any people around. I got my address book, found Helen’s number and dialed it, not even knowing if she was still at that number. 
She was, and she sounded excited when I said who it was. “When did you get here?” she asked. 

“Last night.” 
“I wish you’d called me then.” 
“What did you do for New Year?” I asked. 
“Nothing much. It’s pretty pathetic, I know...” 
“What’re you doing now?” 
“Nothing.” 
“Want to go get a beer?” 
“Yeah! Where?” 
“Wherever you like, as long as it’s someplace I can find.” 
“How about the Cowgirl?” 
“Yeah, great. When?” 
“When can you come?” 
“Right now. It’ll take me a half-hour or so to get there.” 
“Okay,” she said. “Do you remember what I look like?” 
I laughed and said it hadn’t been that long. 

I put on boots, a jacket and watch cap, and wrote a note to Ken and Chrissie. Then I went out to my car. The windshield was so icy I couldn’t see through it. I had to sit for a while with the engine idling while the heat of the car melted the ice. It took longer than the half-hour I’d estimated to get into town; visibility was so poor, I had to drive like an old lady. 

I drove along Cerrillos Road until I saw the lights of Santa Fe, kept going until the desert gave way to concrete. The town was quiet. When I reached Aztec Street I made a left, then made a right on Guadalupe and parked in back of the Cowgirl. 
The warmth of the bar steamed my glasses as soon I stepped inside. I took them off, wiped them, put them back on. Helen was coming towards me, and she hugged me hard. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, and her hair was longer than it had been when I last saw her, long and brown. Her body was thin, her skin pale. The bar was about a quarter-full, and I could see several men looking at her, unable to stop themselves. I couldn’t blame them. 
She already had a drink, but I got her another while I got one for myself. We went to the little alcove area off of the main bar, and sat down. “It’s great to see you,” I said lamely. 

“You too.” 

I asked what she’d been doing since I last saw her. She told me she’d lived with a guy, gotten engaged to him, then they’d broken up and he’d moved out. She’d worked various jobs - waitress, typist, personal assistant to an artist. I realized she was quite drunk already, and told her she shouldn’t have driven, that I would have come and picked her up. “I didn’t drive,” she said. “I walked.” She lived in the apartment she’d had when we first met. It was about a mile from the Cowgirl. 

She said she’d been drinking too much. That was nothing new. The night we met, she approached me in a bar and asked me to give her a ride home because her driver’s license had been suspended because of her cocaine problem. As we left the bar, I said I’d like to go home with her, and she laughed and said, “I was hoping you’d say that.” 
We now joked about that first meeting. As we laughed about it, she leaned over and kissed me hard, filling my mouth with her tongue, which was cold from the mouthful of beer she’d just had. 
We drank more. By the time the Cowgirl closed, I wasn’t as drunk as she was, but I was catching up. As we walked through the snow to my car, she was shivering from the cold. I put an arm around her, and we kissed fiercely. 
Her apartment was on Don Cubero alley, a thin strip of dirt road lined with houses and apartments. She had some beer in the fridge. We drank it and went to bed. 

In the morning, she seemed ill. She was dizzy and sweating, and her entire body shook violently. It was hard for her to speak in sentences. She managed to tell me that she’d barely eaten the day before. I’m hypoglycemic, so I recognized the symptoms. A person experiencing a severe insulin reaction needs to increase their blood sugar. One of the most effective ways of doing this is by drinking orange juice, waiting for it to kick in, and then eating something substantial. I searched in her fridge, but there was no orange juice, and not much of anything else. I remembered that I had some orange juice in my car. I dragged on my clothes and opened the front door. The cold numbed my fingers in the thirty seconds or so it took me to reach the car. I got the juice, ran back inside, and told Helen to drink it. As soon as she touched the container to her lips, her body sucked every drop of the juice down. I lay beside her and held her and stroked her hair until she had stopped shaking. 
Then she ate something. I don’t remember what it was, and I don’t remember if I ate any of it. I do remember that it wasn’t snowing in the morning, and that the sunlight reflected brilliantly off the fallen snow outside, starkly lighting every corner of the bedroom. And I remember that it began to snow again in the early afternoon, making the light softer. We went back to bed, snuggled together and talked. Helen said she knew she had to start taking better care of her health. She knew she ought to drink less and eat better. She smoked heavily, but she said she’d vowed to quit when she was twenty-five, which meant she would smoke for another two years. 

We talked for a couple hours, then began to kiss and touch each other. She’d told me earlier that she was seldom interested in sex when she was sober, and could barely remember the last time it had happened. But something about our conversation, and the room, and the snow outside, made it easy. We lay on our sides, she with her back to me, and we fucked that way for more than an hour. At one point she laughed and said, “Shit, I forgot what it was like sober...it’s exhilarating!” We decided to get up and go out and have dinner somewhere. “Ahhhhhh,” she said, laughing again. “I’ve got semen running out of me...” 
There was talk of more, of some kind of relationship, despite our living in different states. But, however much feeling there is however quickly, five hundred miles is still five hundred miles, and eight hours is still eight hours. There were phone calls, and plans to visit that never panned out, and then nothing. 

Around midnight we left Canter's since the Scot wasn't getting laid and the only celebrity spotted was Rodney Bingenheimer. Mr. Hustwit handed me the keys to the Luxury High-performance Sedan. Within an hour LA was behind us and miles of pitch road lay ahead. “I’m only good to drive for two hours,” I say. My friends Patrick and Bill nestle into the leather interior in the back seat. The LHS allows everyone to stretch out, relax. Cruise control on 85 feels quiescent. Engine silent, radio off. I dream a parallel road. As four young men piss under the stars by the side of the road, steam rises from the mud. Barry takes the wheel. The Scot revs the rented LHS to 110. He squints through the steering wheel. I try to ignore it, to sleep, but he habitually taps the sensitive brake. “Can you slow down?” Bill asks. “Fuck you ya wee cunt.” “Slow down dude. I was just in an accident .” “I know how ta drive.” “Yeah, he’s had a license for a whole year.” “Okay, okay ya cunts.” The Scot slows to 90, reaches into his bag for a pair of dark glasses. It’s moonless here and he’s donned Ray Charles’ shades. “Me prescription specs.” He looks like Mr. Magoo with his big ears and shaved bald head. Even if Señor Magoo could see, the fog has limited visibility to the headlamps. “If a cow wanders into the road we’re dead,” Patrick says. A few miles later the Scot thinks that he sees something in the road, slams the brake pedal and the purple LHS spins west toward the ocean, south toward LA, east toward desolation screeching to a stop. “I gotta piss,” say. The Scot falls for it getting out to stretch and I slip back into the driver’s seat. Rain falls. We arrive in San Francisco at six am, drink green tea and eat toast with marmalade in Chinatown.