I picked up St. Michael in Walcott –Iowa 80, the Shangri-la of American truck- stops, just west of the Quad Cities. I had only stopped to get a quick price on some custom lettering for the truck –“Camerado” on either side by the nose, “Hermit Crab” on the driver’s door. He was sitting sort of slouched by the entrance, asked me if I could help him get moving east. I wasn’t particularly in the mood for a hitcher; I had been working on P&K that morning and things were progressing well, figured I had another two hours of it before nearing Chicago, so I was pretty deep into my Monastery mode. But I couldn't pass him up. He had a large duffle bag and a smaller knapsack, and a guitar in a soft case –as legitimate a hitcher as I’ll ever find out here, a true vagabond soul. God prohibits me from passing these folks by, no matter what my personal feelings dictate.
When I finished my task inside –no one home at the vinyl shop, got a business card—he gathered up his stuff and we climbed aboard. He apologized for smell- ing like cigarettes, which I hadn’t noticed, though he was smoking when I met him. He said he hates them, but he’s “so damn addicted” to them, adding that his mother smoked and took just about every other drug she could find for the first four months of her pregnancy.
He was young and tall and lean, a good-looking guy with bright blue eyes, wavy blonde-over-brown hair sticking out from an unseasonal wool skull cap. His wings were large and full, beautifully plumed, but held tight to his back, like some earthbound bug. He talked with enough West Coast Stoner accent that I could tell right away he had been immersed in that environment for a while, but not so much that he sounded native. Sure enough he soon revealed that he had been tramping up and down the coast, petitioning for NORML, the marijuana law-reform advocacy group, and now he was heading home to Ithaca (I swear I’m not making that up, but I won’t overburden you with Odyssey references). He looked pretty road-weary; later he told me he had gotten some very restless sleep the night before under one of the tents set up in the parking lot for the upcoming Walcott Truckers’ Jamboree. I didn’t know what to expect by way of keeping up a conversation.
Then he noticed my copy of Christ the Eternal Tao on the dashboard. It is a pretty striking volume, over 500 pages and a cover adorned with Chinese characters and an 18th century Russian depiction of an East Asian Jesus seated on an ornate golden throne. He was immediately drawn to it and started reading the part where the author, an Eastern Orthodox monk from California, composed an 81-part poem telling the gospel of Christ from a perspective that is both Orthodox and Taoist –a remarkable piece of work—which he calls both “the Gospel according to Lao-Tzu” and “the New Testament of the Tao Te Ching.” I told Michael a little bit about the background of it, but he mostly wanted to see for himself it seemed, so I let him be. For a stretch of at least 20 minutes, from Walcott right up to the I-80 bridge over the Mississippi, neither of us said a word as he was completely engrossed. Maybe those wings are about to open, I thought.
Then, as if such subversive material were banned by the state of Illinois, Michael placed the book back on the dash and said, “Man, that is an awesome book!” We took in our spanning of the Mighty River together, then started sharing stories of each other’ s lives, mostly his recent travels. He told me about a half-hour high speed car chase he got involved in while hitching in a stolen car on the west coast; a truck
accident on the freeway outside Salt Lake City –first he hears the driver say, “Well if you ain’t about an idiot!” then stomp his brakes, then the sound of a car skidding and the slam as it wedged itself under the trailer (the driver politely and regretfully asked him to hop out before the highway patrol showed up); how he wandered into not one but two sting operations in the same county in Florida, and managed to avoid jail time in both.
Almost all of his stories had one obvious common thread: drugs. Prodigious amounts of drugs. We’re talking, this could be Hunter S. Thompson’s spiritual grandson here. I began to notice, as I have often in the past, that I was in the presence of someone, like the good Dr. T himself, who was so brilliant, so staggeringly bright that he had blinded himself pretty early in life, and was left to feel his way through the world with a hyperactive nervous system and little corresponding restraint (unlike HST, Michael revealed a significant degree of moral sensitivity, if not always restraint, which allows him to wear his enormous sense of pathos closer to his sleeve). People who normally go 120 miles per hour through life don’t seem to go 200 on speed, for instance: they do 100, like everyone else who normally stick to the speed limit. What for others is a breakneck pace, then, for people like Michael is enough of a slowdown that you think you could get out and walk, which has its own set of hazards. But the point is, sometimes getting “high” for some folks is an effort at reaching normal people's low; the theory was supported by his statement that when he takes the right amount of speed, he feels “mellowed out.”
Actually, St. Michael’s description of both the upper and downer experience of crystal meth was so beautiful that I won’t even try to reproduce it here. He described beatific visions of angels and communication from God. “You are God’s son,” he declared definitively, when high on meth. One thing I recall he said about the crash after a speed high, however, is that you feel more profoundly and utterly alone than you ever have in your life. “Nobody, nothing, God is gone. You are literally in hell.” He overdosed on meth during this trip, in Salt Lake, and it took him days to recover. “No one has ever cried harder than I’ve cried,” he said, talking about the crystal meth downer. Bipolar disorder in a jar, it sounds like to me.
It was all such a truly amazing confession, the most touching I’ve encountered on the drug experience, outside the printed word, since first hearing Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” (Ironically, he said many people who hear him sing compare him to Kurt Cobain, another great lyrical confessor of the drug world.) He explained to me in great detail how to whip up a batch of crystal meth at home –the crazy thing is, if it’s not stirred properly, he said, it will explode, and take you and your kitchen with it. I said it hardly seems worth it all, between the risk of detonation and the inevitable crash that follows the high. He agreed with me, but I still sensed that if I had some in the truck that I’d be willing to share he’d be all over it. He was fatalistic about his drug use, saying something to the effect that it will never change and he will need them until they kill him, hinting perhaps to the idea that his chemical dependency started in the womb. The only reason he isn’t dead already, he suggested, is the supreme inner strength that only comes from the Holy Spirit, a will to defy those sum’bitches who would have you in an early grave and make this world a less brilliant place. “There’s nothing that could stop me from living out my dreams,” he said at another point.
IF…..the “if” was unspoken, but we both knew it was there. If what? If not for the bound-up wings?
I suspected from all the religious imagery that he used that Michael was raised in a church, and he was, by his adopted family. He seems to have been outside the fold of any particular church since he was 17 –he’s only 20 now—when the cops busted him for underage smoking in the church parking lot; for reasons that were unclear, he blamed the pastor, and bitched him out pretty good it sounds. He’s been cut loose from Christianity since then, but not at all from Christ. His God talk was very difficult to follow; here he seemed more scattered than ever. Complete and consistent thoughts were rare. He described Jesus as his comforter and tormentor, sometimes in almost the same breath; likewise he talked about how God has given him so many blessings, and being “pissed off” at God for handing him such a raw deal. We all go through these emotions to be sure, but there was a rapid fire nature in the way he described them, and I could tell his were more like passing hurricanes than changing seasons. He continued to mention angels and his experience with different spirits a lot, and he also had a fascination with the “end times.” He’s excited about them, says God tells him we are in them now. He mentioned the year 2012 – a popular hunch for end times theorists, since the ancient Mayan calendar inexplicably ends in our year 2012, time being to them a finite measure— but it was one of those incomplete thoughts. He also had a huge thing about Biblical numerology. Somewhere in First and Second Corinthians, he told me, there are explanations of how everything is based on numbers, and 2 and 3 are the most important –3 being the number for God (the Trinity, has similar significance in Taoism), and I forget what 2 means darnit. Michael said 2 and 3 keep appearing together throughout his life, even on simple things like license plates, and it is always a signal to pay attention and listen to God (note: as I’m writing this I just passed under a sign for the exit to US Highway 23).
It seemed to take no time at all to cross Illinois, and as we talked I was getting to enjoy his company more and more. Around the 90 yardstick, St. Michael excused himself to take a short nap. Maybe some of his scatteredness came from fatigue. You probably know the feeling: first you’re hyper, then you start to feel a little stupid in the head, then the only thing you want to do in the whole world is sleep. And man, he crashed out right away with his head against the window, a jacket for a pillow. I should have offered my bunk, but I knew I wanted to stop only 20 miles down the road for lunch, and I offered him that instead, which was cool by him.
I looked over a few minutes later and St. Michael was out like a light. Maybe the best couple minutes of sleep he’d got in days. I was reminded of a verse from one of the greatest road songs ever written (a song that Jeff put on a mix tape for me years ago, but neither he nor I know what it’s called or who performed it.*): “I see you sleeping there, you’ve got your feet propped up and your wings tied down, and angels in your hair.”
* Maybe you know the song; you’d recognize the opening line, “I never died for you, America,” or the beginning of the chorus, “Morning felt dangerous when we stopped in Wichita.” I’d date it from the ‘80s or early ‘90s. If you know it, please email me. There’ll be a fat reward.
All of 20 years old, he is. Not even old enough to have a beer with me in a tavern if we so choose. Realizing that almost made us seem intergenerational, as if Michael grew up in a harder, faster time than I could relate to. And with our accelerated, speed- fiendish culture there is some merit to that –12 years is a few generations in terms of computers and video games, for instance, so why not people? It was reflected in our relative experience at that tender age. I started out my 21st year as a sheltered college student, and finished it as a sheltered college dropout, living at home and working at Little Caesar’s (I was also reading and writing voraciously and concocting an escape plan, which totally blew my doors off over the next year), and I had done nothing more serious than drink myself into oblivion a few times (OK, a few dozen, but who doesn’t do that?)
So I could probably be excused for sounding a little paternal toward Michael, seeing something in his frantic travels that I wanted to soothe –and yet, who am I kidding? I’m more of a compatriot than anything else. Still, as he lay there quietly a couple feet away, it seemed like the perfect time to talk with the Saint inside Michael:
We reached exit 112, the Morris exit. I knew there’d be a Culver’s just off the freeway. Culver’s is a chain of burger joints covering the Midwest. Their hamburgers are on par with In-n-Out, the renowned California fast food icon, and for those who don’t know that is saying a lot. Both places use 100% natural and fresh beef, never frozen for a moment, and that makes a huge difference in quality over the McDonalds and Burger Kings of the world. Plus Culver’s, being a Wisconsin-born outfit, butters the hamburger buns, and they have fried cheese curds, which are like bite-sized cheddar versions of the best mozzarella sticks you’ll ever have in your life. And frozen custard for dessert if you have room (I go for the curds or the custard nowadays, not both). It’s probably my favorite for road food right now. I can’t recommend it enough.
Michael awoke from his short slumber, went to freshen up, then ordered a cod basket. He accepted his free lunch very graciously, the kind of grace that makes you feel honored to be able to do it. Because we ordered separately, we were each handed a different plastic number stand to place on our table so the food server could find us. This got us talking about Biblical numerology again; he was telling me some very complicated code that he found in the word “fruitful” from God’s instructions to the human race in Genesis: “be fruitful and multiply.” We looked at the numbers we had been given, and damned if his wasn’t 23! “See, I told you!” he laughed. Mine was 67, so I asked him what that means. Without a second of hesitation he said, “Faith complete.”
Really?
Yeah, he explained to me, 6 represents faith, and 7 means wholeness, to be complete.
I smiled, feeling my own wings loosen up quite a bit, stretch a little further. Maybe after all this time, after all this struggle to understand my own beliefs…there really is completion. Nothing left to seek, nothing left to do but share.
My new friend Tom, the Latter-day saint from Utah, assumed that I was still seeking a spiritual home because I like to visit different churches on these travels. Maybe I assumed he was right; maybe there were doubts lingering from the time spent in the ACF flock, under the shepherding of the Calvary Chapel, when I interrogated myself daily, trying to coerce myself to be content and conform. But God had another message for me then, and maybe he does now. “Your faith is complete. The truth is Christ, and Christ is in your heart. Seek Christ in all things and all beings; this is your only mission.”
For the first time in my life perhaps, I knew that I had been given something to give back, something worth giving.
We sat and talked for a while after lunch. The nap seemed to do Michael a lot of good. He was quite a bit more mellow, a lot less scattered in his thoughts, or at least his delivery. He thanked me a few times for lunch and for helping him out in general. I said if I weren’t driving I’d probably be doing the same thing…minus the drugs hopefully. In between anecdotes and end times/numerology theories, Michael had been saying all along that he needs to give up the tramp life, settle down in Ithaca a while to be around friends. Now he was able to flesh out his ideas a little more: he wanted to get a job and an apartment, start working out again –he revealed a cute little narcissistic streak, a minor obsession with his weight and checking himself in mirrors, and consequently he really wants to get buff—and even start college. How much of these Norman Rockwellesque goals come from his genuine desire to steady himself on a straight-and-narrow path, and how much is an echo from the parents and schools and church of his recent past, I could never know, but it really doesn’t matter. I reminded him of what he said earlier about nothing being able to stop him. I was also telling him, without going into detail, about my writing projects, and how after years of struggling with getting things on paper I had finally found work that felt like a calling, that came so natural that it seems to write itself. Michael replied that he has been ignoring his calling for three years –or, one can deduce, roughly the time since he left his church. I’m glad he didn’t want to substantiate that thought; I kind of like that it is mysterious to me. I just told him whatever it is, he needs to do it, that it will eat him alive if he doesn’t. He seemed to appreciate that. I can only hope that the whole course of the morning was snipping away at some of his golden threads, just as it was with mine.
Back in the truck, I got a message from above that after my drop in Chicago I’d pick up another trailer at the rail yard and bring it up to Minnesota. I was hoping I’d be sent farther east, to Ohio or Pennsy or Jersey, so I could take Michael a little closer to Ithaca. But the same God who arranged for us to meet that morning was now arranging for us to part a few hours later, and that’s what we were to do. I took him to the Pilot truck stop in Minooka, the last stop along I-80 before the I-55 junction that would take me north to Windy Town. Michael asked if he could exchange his winter hat for one of my baseball caps. I was delighted by the idea and let him pick out his choice. (I’m sure it was the humid eastern summer weather that persuaded him to trade headwear, but I can always imagine that Michael also thought we should have something to remember each other by) He chose the San Luis Obispo Blues Baseball hat, with the blues-hound hat-and-shades-wearing baseball and sax for the “S” in “Blues” logo –the only one I have that is virtually irreplaceable. But I was happy that he’d have it and would be sporting it all the way to Ithaca. What further adventures lay ahead on the last third of his journey!
When I pulled up to the fuel lane at Pilot, I reached up to the envelope where I keep my tithe money. I had been saving it to bring to ACF when I get back to Ashland, but I don’t think that is my intention anymore. The world is my home church now. All there was to give him was a ten dollar bill, but he accepted it like it was ten thousand. We lugged his gear down to the ground, then did one of those complex handshakes “all the kids do these days” (snicker, snicker). He told me he was going to look up Christ the Eternal Tao in the bookstore when he gets home, and I thought, “Aha! Christotheism’s first unintentional convert!” The he said, “God bless you,” and turned his wings toward points east, leaving me far less alone than I was when I awoke. – HC , near Trenton, Ontario
