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A hysterical tale of two old retired guys on a road trip desperately trying to relive their youth
We shot out of North Seattle like demons from hell. It was early, 11:30 am, and we were desperate for a hit, so we wedged into the Starbucks drive-through line with red eyes dripping and demanded a pair of quadruple shot ventis and two sugar-drenched donuts. We tossed the pimple-faced teen a $10 bill and shouted, “Keep the change, motherfucker,” as we burned rubber out of that nightmare.
“Wait, that’s not enough…” the kid’s voice trailed away.
But it was enough. For now at least.
Fully charged with enough caffeine to raise the dead, we pulled onto the freeway, the long ribbon of freedom, the path that would take us down the west coast on a one-week trip to revisit the glory days of our youth.
Then we got stuck in traffic and I had to pee.
Alternative truths
Steven and I met in college and became fast friends. We competed aggressively at everything — partying, games, girls (and a little studying). We took road trips together, roomed together, and swapped stories that have grown into magnificent legends that get better with each telling.
In our senior year, 41 years ago, we took an epic road trip to San Francisco in pursuit of adventure, girls, and beer. It may have involved alternative states of consciousness but we’re not sure. The fog of time and lives well lived have muddled our memories — but not the legends — it’s made them better.
“It doesn’t have to be true, it just needs to be a good story”
— Life lesson from another old college buddy
We graduated in the early 80s and then life got in the way. We took jobs, wives, mortgages, and our careers separated us for decades. In retirement, we reconnected and made a pact to recreate our infamous road trip of yore.
So, filled with the vague memories of the kinds of mischief and scandal you’d find in Hunter S. Thompson novels, we strapped ourselves, some clean underwear, and our cardiac medications into a fuel-efficient Civic, dropped the pedal to the metal, and crept at the speed of quaaludes through the infamous Seattle traffic in the carpool lane — and crashed head-on into a week of unbridled debauchery.
Eight and a half fingers
The drugs had worn off by the time we reached the coast of Oregon, so we pulled off and sat on a rock ledge overlooking the beach and reloaded. We popped the tabs on a couple of cans of Rainier beer and toasted to the first day of a week of impending shenanigans.
The sun was setting when we got to Newport, Oregon, and we don’t like driving in the dark, so we decided to get a hotel and grab some grub and grog. There’d be plenty of time left to teach this quiet little seaside town how to party.
A young toothless man shaped like an egg and wearing a reflective safety vest yelled at me as I stepped out of the car to fill it with gas. “Hey — Don’t do that!” he yelled. Evidently, Oregon still won’t let you pump your own gas — imagine the carnage if we did.
Little did we know, it was spring break and every family on the west coast brought their kids, dogs, and minivans here for the week. I thought they all went to Florida or Cancún. But regardless the town was sold out and we can’t sleep in cars like we used to, our backs would revolt. Panicked, we called down the coast and found a room with two mattresses in the town of Yachats, a thriving metropolis of 553 people. We raced the curves down the coast like an F1 driver, passing soccer moms like they were parked with the hope of making it before the last restaurant in town closed.
We crossed the finish line with five minutes to spare, checked in, quickly flirted with the 82-year-old receptionist (she didn’t look a day over 70), and darted into the restaurant for a manly mystery-meat pizza and chardonnay or three.
The portly man at the adjacent table invaded our conversation and taught us all about the exciting world of agate hunting. As Dale spoke, he gestured wildly with all eight and a half of his fingers, (the others likely lost in an agate hunting mishap), while he revealed the sordid details of his lonely struggle with alcoholism between gulps of rosé.
We vanquished a defenseless bottle of Syrah in our room that night as we manufactured stories of long-forgotten adventures and speculated about the new ones to come.
Our adventure had begun.
I went to a casino and all I got were these drill bits
After our morning constitutional and a fistful of ibuprofen, we set off at noon on our next adventure. We passed stunning rock pillars slowly dissolving in the surf. We saw thousands of carved myrtle wood stores, dune buggies, safaris, and RVs as thick as thieves. Hawks circled overhead looking for roadkill which we hoped wouldn’t be us.
All while we eagerly stalked the elusive adventure.
Turns out the coast isn’t all that adventurous and we were hungry, so we pulled into one of the small towns that looks exactly like the others. We found their only restaurant down a long dirt road and took turns with the port-a-potty because at our age we never pass up a bathroom.
The owner, Kevin, must have heard us and came out to investigate. A large and lonely man, he was a wag and eager for company. He toured us through every inch of his beloved restaurant with blow-by-blow details of every door frame and shingle. No customers and no food though, he was closed.
Nevertheless, he prattled on seemingly without inhaling. In a desperate escape attempt, we jumped in the car but Kevin was quick for his size and looped his arm over my door before I could slam it shut while his mouth spewed like a leaky hose. When he reached up to point us towards the city’s most historic grain silo, I saw an opportunity and punched the gas, leaving the poor man spinning yarns in a cloud of dust.
Next we came to Eureka. It’s a wonderful place if you like meth. It’s filled with quaint Victorian homes and overpriced hotels with lovely views of plywood-accented apartments, bent lawn furniture, and skinny men with tattoos.
We prefer beer over meth-addled gangs, so we drove on and finally settled on a casino for the night. It was cheap and advertised $19 prime rib and who can turn that down? The meat was chewy and cold, but the tables were hot. Steven won $100 on Blackjack and after an hour of table play and a few watered-down drinks, we were automatically entered into their Club Extravaganza lottery.
We both won! (I think everyone did), and we selected packages of black matte drill bits over the plastic cheese platter because we’re men. Men can never have too many drill bits.
A salesman, a physicist, and a judge walk into a bar
Forty-one years ago, Steven and I drained more than our share of beers in The Saloon, the oldest tavern in San Francisco. Strip clubs and The Saloon were prime targets for adventure but it’s too creepy for old men to leer at naked girls, so we opted to leer at stained walls and beers instead.
We were the first customers at noon and the last customers to leave at 2:00 am. In between, we window shopped and took naps because bad backs and sore hips couldn’t possibly sit in a bar for fourteen hours straight.
Every day of the week, the old tavern is hopping with rock and blues music and plenty of illegal smiles. We sat at the bar drinking four-dollar beers and five-dollar well drinks, just like we think we did forty-one years ago. The clientele started out old, hunched, and gray but grew younger and taller as the geezers left for bed. We stuck it out, fortified with caffeine and our dogged quest.
A salesman and his motormouth fiancée sat at the bar next to us. Her lips flapped relentlessly even when the music was overwhelming. He was on his way to Japan, perhaps to escape her incessant din. They were both on the way to their third marriage. Cute couple, but destined for another marital disaster.
They were replaced by a lanky physicist and his mousey wife, visiting from Scotland. They nursed one glass of wine for two hours until the bartender finally snatched it away while they were dancing.
Our next and final interloper was a young judge from Luxembourg, on holiday to reassess his relationship with his girlfriend. He was on the prowl but didn’t seem to have the guts to do anything other than buy us drinks, which was fine with us. Until the next morning.
Dazed and confused
Hunter S. Thompson would have been proud of us, but he also would have had a better arsenal of drugs to delay the deathly hangover. Unlike his, our drugs were legal, like shooting bear with spitwads.
We finally woke up at the crack of 11:00 and called for a late checkout. We mixed ourselves a strong cocktail of coffee, Tylenol, and Advil and hoped for the best. Today was Napa wine-tasting day and it wasn’t going to go well.
The wine tasted like wet cardboard but we bought some anyway, trusting that it would be good because other people liked it. More bumps of coffee seemed like a better idea so we got fudge mochas, donut sugar bombs, and a syringe of insulin in case of overdose.
With no interest in alcohol, and realizing that we’ve far exceeded the recommended daily allowances of caffeine and sugar, we hit the road with a soothing jazz playlist and pointed the car toward Ashland, Oregon, where we hoped to recover our wits and enjoy a nice midsummer night’s dream.
The sign that said “Lake Tahoe Nevada” jarred us out of our stupor. We missed a turn in Sacramento and went more than an hour the wrong way. Idiots.
God likes beer, I saw it with my own eyes
A white-bearded man in a flowing robe, I’m sure it was God, emerged from the toilet in a dive bar just a block off the Oregon I-5 freeway. We’d stopped there for a mid-afternoon pint and must have entered the holy land accidentally.
God was drinking a tomato beer concoction and the white hair around his frown was wet and pink. He didn’t seem to have any disciples with him at the time, perhaps they were getting dinner ready.
Steven and I were on our second-to-last day and we were pub-crawling up the I-5 corridor (don’t worry — we were carefully moderating our intake). “Pints and pool games in dive bars” was our adventure of the day, and this dusty shack had everything — $3.00 pints, free pool, and eternal salvation.
The walls were painted with despondency. Camouflage jackets and bellies the size of a Mopar Hemi were the local uniforms. Scowls and suspicion greeted us until Bald Kevin piped up: “What are you guys doin’?” he asked as if we didn’t belong there. Which of course we didn’t.
One hour and two truth-free life stories later, we were best friends with everyone except God, he was morose and angry, like in the Old Testament.
While the locals waddled like penguins in and out of the bathroom, Kevin joined us for some pool, deeply confused by the rules but thankful to have company that spoke in full sentences.
The experience was as lively as a revival, but ultimately we had to bid adieu, else we would drink too much and be smited.
You can’t go back
Our final stop was at Denny’s. Long ago that was our go-to place for 2:00 am grease and salt, and neither of us had been there in decades, so we thought it was a fitting nostalgic conclusion to our trip.
We ate off the 55+ menu and took an extra discount at the register with our AARP cards. It was a bargain, sure, but let’s just say between us that their meals are best consumed when one is heavily sedated with whisky.
“You can’t go home again.”
-Thomas Wolfe
We pulled into the driveway and dragged our old bones into the living room to greet our wives who were thankful we made it back alive.
Thomas Wolfe famously claimed “You can’t go home again,” but in a way, we proved him wrong. We proved that we can, at the very least, return to the scene of the crime. If we take enough naps and ibuprofen, that is.