Having driven through the state a dozen times, and visiting Omaha in the distant past when a friend used to live there, one would assume that Nebraska wouldn’t be mysterious to me. It is a mammoth state with only one interstate expressway running through it. You have a bit more life happening on the eastern bits. Some stark American Indian reservations in the north, a region overwhelmed with sand grass. When you think of sand grass you think of dunes, but it is really just rolling hills with thin grass refracting a deep green tone onto your legs when you walk through it. In the west, the sand grass is dotted with rock formations poking out. In fact, to my surprise, coming into the state from
Wyoming, while it appears you’re driving through plains, you’re actually over a mile into the sky.
In everywhere from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest, people asked me about my travelling schedule. When I mentioned Lincoln, Nebraska, they’d reply “I’m sorry” or, “that sucks”. Why? Were they wrongly accused of treason in Nebraska? Did they go at rare moment when Nebraska had a blizzard while Iowa and South Dakota had mild weather? More than likely, they haven’t visited Nebraska. They probably don’t even know anyone in Nebraska. They probably don’t even know what states border Nebraska.
What I don’t know sucks. I’m sorry you’re traveling to a place I never considered travelling to before.
That being said, I have never had fun in Nebraska. I once got a speeding ticket on I-80, and while the police officer was walking back to my car with my penalty for digitally being seen by him, my friend helped me imagine him turning into a badger, running out into the middle of the highway, and exploding like a helicopter hitting a gas station in a Hollywood blockbuster when a car struck him. My laughter at this fiction fed the police officer’s frustration and paranoia. While it didn’t get me in trouble, he questioned what was so funny. My answer was so unimaginative that I can’t even recall it.
The air in Nebraska in July feels like the air in the Mississippi Delta, but if I was a creature that was able to survive such extremities. You can cut through the air with a knife without any problem breathing it. Storm clouds loom, but never deliver. Nobody seems to care anyway. It is as if they’ve been hanging there since spring.
After doing some rather reckless off road trekking in the high desert earlier this week, I severely damaged the undercarriage of my 2009 Hyundai Sonata. I’m not sour about it. I knew it would probably happen eventually. When it happened it felt like an expected check coming for a meal I had eaten. I had a day or 2 off anyway, and my car was driving just fine, there was just a worrisome noise that I wanted to have investigated. On the way in, at a truck stop sparsely populated with insects, exhausted tourists, and 1991 video game machines, I overheard a conversation between one of my crew members and a young woman working the check out counter.
Woman: Where y’all from?
Rodger: Chicago.
Woman: That sucks.
Huh? Why does that suck? Are we rivals in some sport that I’ve not discovered? Does everyone in Nebraska hate everyone outside of Nebraska, and that’s why everyone outside of Nebraska hates Nebraska? Or is it the other way around?
Moving right along. I don’t mind the evening heat on the drive in as much as I mind the balance of moisture in the air. Music has become boring and audiobooks make me sleepy. I’ve run out of conversation and turned into a machine. If I think about…reality, everything looks like I’m watching it on television. This is entertaining, but a little too entertaining. That road leads directly to anxiety, which we don’t need while driving 84mph into Lincoln, NE. I always try to drive 9mph over the speed limit. I figure it is fast enough to make a difference to me, but not a police officer. The whole idea of police officers hiding and sniping people is an infringement of the freedoms that I value so highly when I step into my car and drive 6,000 miles in a week. I’m not even going to think about it now. Maybe it doesn’t exist anyway, since I’m still a little worried about this reality problem that I now can’t distract myself from since this drive is so mundane. In reality people have real problems, unlike this.
Everyone here is talkative and nice. I’m always the talkative and nice one, and now I’m being beaten at my own game. Part of, no, most of my talkative and nice behavior is secretly malicious. In Chicago people are scared to death of everything. If I approach a woman at a grocery store and ask her to recommend me some peanut butter, her first thought is not what peanut butter she likes. It is what my real agenda is. Am I trying to hit on her? Am I going to steal her purse when she is distracted thinking about peanut butter? Am I a psychopath who only rapes women that answer “Jiffy”? I love it. It is so awkward. So unnecessarily awkward. I feed off of it. I find myself opening innocent conversations with people just to watch them victimize themselves. It’s not that they don’t care, or that they’re bad people. They just don’t understand that I have feelings. They live in the big city for a reason, and that is to grow and take. They won’t have kids there or start a local business. They are an uprooted tree floating between other uprooted trees. Why would I be nice to them without something up my sleeve? Nobody else is.
For some sick reason, I’m addicted to the awkwardness of them knowing that they should be nice. It was hammered into their head by their parents. But if they put their guard down for one second and tell me what their favorite peanut butter is, their whole sky will rip open. The whole reason they pay $2,000 for a single bedroom apartment with no screens on the windows will become obsolete.
I awoke with a hangover that I didn’t earn. Grumbling to myself about how the entire day will be horrible, I ventured into my car half-asleep and had my phone take me to the nearest auto mechanic. I didn’t even open the windows. The hot car was punishment that I had somehow earned. Of course, subconsciously. I didn’t punish myself on purpose. I was just apathetic about letting myself be comfortable. But I deserved to be comfortable. I’m not saying it made sense.
My phone brought me to an empty trailer park. Not abandoned empty. But everyone must’ve been at work. In Chicago trailer parks are usually reserved for those who do not work. If they do, their job is often an illegal one that takes place inside the trailer park. Why am I thinking about this, I need to get my damn car fixed.
After calling the place, the man tells me Google is way off and gives me the real address. It is on the other side of town, but the other side of town is 5 minutes away so I’m not too upset. I pull up and find the guy with his head buried into the hood of a forest ranger’s SUV. I explain my situation to him as if I had it laminated in front of me like a telemarketer reading a script:
“Hi. I’m on a long road trip and I ended up here. A couple of days ago I stupidly drove on a really crappy mountain road and the wheel wells in it dipped, crashing the bottom of my car into some desert rocks. Now, whenever I put the car in reverse or drive and idle or drive very slowly, I get this loud fast rumbling sound that vibrates the car. I know it’ll take some time to fix it, but I just want to make sure it is safe to drive another 1,000 miles.”
He listened with interest, never lacking on eye contact or the appropriate amount of head nods and “uh huh”s. When I was done, he promptly said he was all booked up, but told me to ask the place next door. The place next door was an even shittier looking independent mechanic. I don’t really have a plate of options here, so I thank him and head out the door to repeat myself 50 steps to the left. The man walks me out and offers a firm handshake and tells me that he wishes me luck on my journey. Despite the black grease on his hands, this is just too warm to turn down.
The inside of the shop next door looked more seedy than the outside. If you were to see a 1990’s television episode about an auto mechanics shop in Alabama, this would be where it was shot. A weird organic smell permeated the inside, and for a moment I wondered, physically and scientifically, if and how heat can make a smell travel farther. I rang the bell and a very, ugh, dumb looking man came to the counter. I don’t want to judge a book by its cover, and I never do. Nothing this man said or did would indicate that he was any less intelligent than myself. He was just dumb looking. Like Dobber in Coach or Gomer Pyle. He has that dumb look on his face. And realistically, he could probably run quite a few genius schemes with it if he were so inclined. A good scheme would be running an auto repair shop and telling city folk like myself that their car isn’t drivable unless the rotary alignment axle belt is replaced and timed, which will cost $800.
Roadtrip accident story take 2.
He hears me out, not as attentively as the first gentleman, but not insultingly either. Then he tells me him and his guys are all booked up for the week, but him and 1 of his mechanics will look at it during their lunch break if I come back at 2pm. How can I refuse? I have 2 hours to kill and need a clean dress shirt for my performance tonight, so I’ll just let my problems solve themselves by finding just that. After enjoying the first civilized shopping experience in weeks, I decided to get my car washed. Surely if these guys are taking off their lunch break the least I could do is wash the pounds of salt off of my undercarriage. I was driving on salt flats and boy does that stuff stick. Right now, 2 days and 2 showers later, I can taste an unusually high amount of salt on my finger. Salt is coating everything. Salt and dust. I stopped caring about the dust because it didn’t have taste. I ate out of dusty bowls and drank out of dusty water bottles. Salt though, blech.
So I return with a car that doesn’t even resemble the one I arrived with the first time. I had that moment when I turn around a look at it like it was my child achieving something. “Wow. That’s my car.”
The man walked out to the car and led me to a waiting room. I’ve never been impressed with an automotive waiting room, but this one was on the edge of some category that I couldn’t define. A couch and a recliner, both old torn leather with cowboy art woven into them. It smelled like a dog had spent some time in there, but not used it as a bathroom. There was a window looking into the vacant lot next door, and an air conditioner pumping on high but not at all doing its job. If you stood in front of it, half of your body would be slightly cooler. 3ft away, it didn’t stand a chance against the merciless rays of dusty afternoon sunlight enveloping the tiny room and bringing the leather furniture to a near boil. Of course there was the coffee machine without any coffee. Everything in that corner was stained with coffee. Either cup rings or splattered drops or even just a chocolate hue of hot coffee vapors painting the table 2 presidents ago. I was prepared to make myself comfortable here. I had to.
Before I reached any level of comfort the man returned to give me the news about my car. I’d need a whole new exhaust. Oh? To get home? No, no. Just to have the car like new again. Him and his mechanic banged out the muffler and pipes so they no longer were smashed against the chassis, which was causing that rumble. It should be fine now. The expression on my face must’ve looked like I was a child. He didn’t ask for any money, and I told him that I insist on buying him and his mechanic lunch. We went back and forth until he finally accepted it. I jokingly told him that he should open an auto shop in Chicago, where he could’ve asked me for $1,000 for that and probably would’ve gotten it out of me. The dumb looking man’s response was:
“Sir, I wouldn’t ever want to do that. I wouldn’t sell my dignity for any amount of money.”
Wow. I took a moment to take that in. You see, my step-grandfather who raised me, likened to a mob boss by many people who met him, was the last person I heard utter something like that. He was a man with unfathomable dignity. He wouldn’t go to the gas station for cigarettes without dressing up. Most importantly, for me anyway, when he saw a child living below the poverty line, there was no question about what to do. The ultra-dignified man who has raised children of his own will give up his golden years to raise another one. He won’t enjoy his golden years with the curse of wondering what happened that that child. That child is me, and that dignity is the reason I’m here. This dumb looking guy is a lot smarter than I thought. He’s right. That dignity is the most important thing in the world. That dignity is why I won’t fly to a city to play a show and fly home in a weekend. That dignity is why I fought back when being mugged years ago, despite it leaving me with severe head injuries. That dignity makes the world go around.
Not everyone is a cowardly victim. Maybe that’s why the girl in the truck stop apologized that my friend is from Chicago. Maybe she visited North Chicago and likened it to visiting an expensive cemetery. A place lacking eye contact where someone momentarily suspects you of being a rapist for asking the time.
Back at the motel, I dug through my giant sack of clothing and found my basketball shorts that I use as quick drying swim trunks and made way for the pool. I met a bunch of small children who all live in the motel and played catch with them with a Nerf water-ball that I almost psychically bought at the store earlier in the day. The kids were extremely inquisitive and well-behaved, and spent the remainder of the afternoon wondering what the recipe is for raising such delightful kids. Surely their life isn’t very ideal, as they’re living in a hotel and their mother is letting them play for hours with a tattoo’d and bearded man who is swimming alone in basketball shorts. I became pretty tired and laid on one of the dirty plastic lawn recliners next to the pool. There was a miniature one next to me that the only boy in a family of girls laid down in. I covered my eyes with the towel to block out the sun and he did the same. The clouds parted a bit more and it warmed my body like a hot tub. Across the street a construction crew was tearing down a building. The nearby airport and train tracks occasionally rumbled the plastic I was laying on. We laid there for a half hour without saying a word. I took a deep breath of the slight fumes in the air. The sun was contrasting everything deeply, and when a fly landed on me, he or she was welcome on the property. The laundry list of things that ruined your idea of what a perfect poolside afternoon should look like made it perfect.
If anyone asks me about Nebraska, I’ll just answer: Nebraska is reality.
Show time, and time to leave this green room couch.
