The mountain road has finally gotten at the odd contraption of rusty metal, cracked vinil and greasy parts that I jokingly called a car. The engine sputtered for the very last time just as I crossed over a mountain pass and seized, sending its tortured soul to the sky in a cloud of noxious steam and smoke.
Of course, rolling downhill was pretty easy - just shift into Neutral and make sure to brake on the curves. Finding a place to abandon the lifeless body of that car - so tow-truck-driving hyenas can feed on its parts just as their furry cousins feed on dead fodder - was much harder.
The road was narrow and winding - just as mountain roads are supposed to be - so just ditching it at the roadside would surely mean that some teenager on a motorcycle will plow into it in the dark. Letting it just roll off the cliff meant that it would never get a proper burial under the crusher, but instead rust for years in a ditch that they called a river - polluting it with whatever hellish concoctions were its blood when it was still alive.
So I just rolled downhill, letting the unavoidable gravity take its toll, and fearing having to push it back up later. Just as I was losing hope of a parking spot, a sign, a sqare feces-brown piece of aluminum with white reflective writing, emerged as if from nowhere.
Scenic Overlook 100 ft. ---------------> - it said.
Gently stepping on the brake pedal for the last time, I stopped at a crushed-gravel turnoff. Collected my stuff that always laid around the car, never touched, and dumped it on the front seat. Pulled my backpack out of the tattered trunk, and flopped it on the floor. Going through these long-ago-meaningful artifacts was always an experience I dreaded, and now I was facing a choice of either letting them perish forever with the car, or lugging them in my backpack through the mountains.
Hmm... Oil change receipts... Gone! A plastic tube that used to hold my ex-girlfriend's lipstick until it melted in the glovebox one summer day, submerging the other junk in there into a red greasy mess that made my car smell like perfume but I never cleaned up because it was better than the smell of exhaust fumes and burning oil that otherwise took over the interior. Gone!
Picture of me and her, last summer, perched up on a tree branch over a creek, smiling at an unknown tourist kind enough to take a snapshot for us... I hesitated, holding this picture, a little piece of paper that held a record of my blissful life way-back-when. Getting rid of it was logical - I was starting all over, after all - but a creeping feeling told me to keep it, keep it as a proven, solid evidence that I was actually happy sometime, telling me in times of deep dispair that I might be happy again - if I try hard enough. I stuffed it deep into a little-used pocket of the backpack, hoping that if would be covered with other junk, but emerge in one piece just when I needed it to keep me sane.
Some papers from college. Hey, I took this class three years ago! What? A "D"? Oh yeah, I remember. The teacher was a little dried-up Japanese sage, a wizard of integrals, differential equations and Zen. He was wise beyond his years (which probably numbered in the hunderds) - that is if you could speak Japanese. He taught by speaking to the blackboard, in a low breathy voice, words covered by thick accent barely reaching our ears. People came to his class to sleep - some demonstratively covering their ears with Walkman headphones - but he didn't notice or particularly care. The blackboard was an honest, receptive student, absorbing all of the cryptic symbols with greatest ease - even if he forgot what language he was speaking and wrote comments in Japanese. Heh... No wonder half of the students in that class flunked. I barely squeaked through with a "C" that later haunted me as a low grade-average nearly cut me off from graduate school. Gone! (or should I make it into paper airplanes and let them fly off that cliff over there?)
A medicine box - band-aids, aspirin, allergy medicine. Pack it in.
Fliers that I made for our band's last gig. A monstrous flop it was. Two people showed up - and they left after first half of the set. The bartender told us to pack it in because we were scaring away the customers - and we gladly did. The mood was far from festive.
It was a day after a bomb exploded on campus, killing a freshman girl and her quarterback boyfriend. Two lives cut short - she, madly in love with his biceps, and he, taking her as yet another freshman to pass through the bed in his lavish paid-for-by-the-scholarship loft. Nobody knew who was responsible for putting a fertilizer-and-diesel filled piece of pipe into a trashcan, and why, why here?
There was nothing about the school that was not average - not even a single famous professor - just another college in a small Midwestern town in the middle of nowhere. No religous tensions, me being one of three Jews on a nearly all-Swedish-lutheran-conservative-republican campus. And the bomb seemed to be so out of this world, belonging to the littered streets of the Middle East, or barricades of Northern Ireland - but a Midwestern college town?
We put the band together out of boredom, and played bebop and jazz standards in dorm rooms, basements and attics until chased out by the landlords or floor coordinators, later moving into the campus pub that was the only place to have a beer or eat something that didn't resemble stuff (don't dare call it food) churned out by the college cafeteria - that is unless you wanted to drive for ten miles to the county seat that had (oh joy!) a hideously bad Chinese place and a greasy-spoon diner. We played in all of these places, and moved outside in the spring, letting an open saxophone case collect meager tips from near-bankrupt students.
Oh well, so much for that. A melted lipstick-smeared audiotape. Beatles. "Baby you can drive my car... Yes I'm gonna be a star..." - it sang over and over as I watched my now former, past, ex-, girlfriend get up and slam the car door after pecking me on the cheek and wishing luck for the last time. I threw that tape in the glovebox (where, as you remember, a puddle of melted lipstick still glistened in its former cherry-red glory), and let it melt in the summer sun as memories of my other life melted under the rays of time. Gone.
I went through the rest of the stuff, throwing most of it out, zipped my backpack and slammed the door shut. The keys in the ignition - if anyone gets the poor thing started, they can have it. Walking away from the rusty Olds, I finally noticed the cliff - and what lay under it. Before me lay a valley, vast as life itself. Criss-crossed by smaller mountain ranges, dotted with little blobs of light that were villages and towns, bound together by barely visible country roads, all of it opened before me in last fading rays of evening sun, showing me whatever was left of a gorgeous sunset. A mighty interstate, visible from afar as a band of white and red lights, streamed like a river to its final destination on the coast.
I started walking back towards the road, but turned around to take a last look at the Olds, carrying in its cavernous belly the pieces of my old life, whose couch-like plush backseat provided a welcome Lover's Lane refuge to me and many of my friends that borrowed the car, more spacious than their dorm rooms. Someday, if it does not get crushed and melted together with other scrap metal, some archaeologist might find whatever is left of it, sift through the junk in the front seat and wonder about my life - the one I'm leaving behind as all my worldly posessions, fitting neatly into a backpack, travel with me to a new one. I wondered if that was what reincarnation meant - conciously leaving the old behind and walking toward the new.
Thinking that, I slowly walked away, disappearing into a dark serpentine road to new life, a narrow winding road with no hope of hitching a ride.