I’ll Love You Until L.A.
by Joe Decker
We couldn’t stop.
I dropped Amy off at Dayton International on a wet, snowy morning, then picked her up three days later on a snowy, wet afternoon. After graduating a semester early, she’d spent Christmas in Los Angeles with her parents. Years earlier, they left Ohio for the good life on Santa Monica Beach. Now Amy was moving to L.A. to work for her father. One night before her graduation we laid, curled up naked in her bed. We promised each other to drive out the last of her possessions after Christmas. Which brings me back to the airport.
I spent the night before packing her car with the beer mugs, picture frames and Hüsker Dü LPs that she wouldn’t trust anyone else to deliver to California. Her beat-up old Volvo was in short-term parking. With a pocket full of snotty kleenex, I squirmed in a seat that felt like an exact replica of my fourth grade desk chair. The jabbering sales man with a comb-over in the next seat made me even more uncomfortable. He talked like it was the only thing to keep him from lighting up a cigarette. His speech was couched in a buddy-buddy tone. The slow-pitch questions kept coming, things like, “Where ya going?” Things that I couldn’t answer with a grunt.
“I don’t know,” I said. That got a laugh out of him. Of course, he didn’t care what my answer was as long as I talked to him. I’d sat next to enough lonely people in my life to know I was trapped.
His story came uninvited and unwanted. “Boy, last month I was here to pick up a client. We had to go out west on I-70 to this plant we have in Illinois. Watch our product being made, understand? Well, my boss tells us to meet him at the exit for 127, which is the middle of nowhere. Except across from the gas station, there’s a girlie bar, and he’s parked there and waiting for us. So my boss opens up the door and tells the client, ‘Tit’s on us.’
“Oh man, I almost got thrown out of the joint by the manager, because I kept laughing. Well, I’m sorry, here I was on company time, with my boss, expensing lap dances. Now, the dancing was awful, but those girls weren’t too used to being laughed at, so they got bitchy. I was just being myself. Not my fault it was so damn funny.”
I said a silent prayer for somebody to bash my head in with a pipe if I ever ended up like this guy. But I was too nice to say, Fuck off, to his face. I wished I could be mean like that. Instead, it was “Who are you picking up today?”
“My wife,” he told me. “She’s visiting her sick dad in Boca.” I stared at the ceiling panels. Jesus, who’s got it worse: third-string cheerleaders from Indiana grinding to Mötley Crüe while this freak giggles, or the woman who agreed to spend the rest of her life with him? As cranky as I was, I felt a thrill to see Amy step off her plane. I fled from the blabbering salesman and grabbed Amy. We kissed long enough to make even jaded airport-goers stare. Our hearts were pumping so fast, we all but ran past the Cinnabons and newsstands. When we finally got to Amy’s car in the parking lot, she was a little out of breath. There were already some tears around her eyes. We sat down in the Volvo, our hands clasped over the gearshift.
Not for the first time, a dim thought buzzed in the back of my head. It tried to get out like a fly battering a window. It nagged, What the hell are you doing? I’d been ignoring this voice ever since I’d met Amy. So I just started the car and punched in “Panama.” We had to get to L.A.
Amy lunged over and turned off the stereo. “No Van Halen, honey.” She wanted to say more. Instead she kissed me. I kissed back. When things kept going, I tried to turn off the ignition with my left hand, while I undid her bra with the right. She started unbuttoning my flannel. After three buttons she growled and yanked it over my head.
“We should try and leave our clothes on. Someone could come by anytime,” I said.
“I don’t care. I want to see your chest, your shoulders.” She listened enough to keep her pants around her ankles. Communication was one of our strengths. Also, her jeans wouldn’t slide past her boots.
Afterwards, she pulled her clothes pulled back into place. I used my shirt to wipe the condensation off the windows so that I could see if parking lot security was standing outside the car. They all had the sense to stay put, unlike Amy and me.
We couldn’t stop, but that had always been our problem.
One day after the airport, I was putting the Midwest behind us. Last night, we’d made it to St. Louis before finally pulling over, ripping the sheets off some hotel bed and the clothes off each other. Afterward, I tried to ask what was going to happen when I boarded a flight home from California.
Amy hugged me. “Let’s worry about tonight.” She slid her hand down my body, replacing the hurt in my brain with an ache in my body.
The next morning, we hunkered in the wagon’s old bucket seats. Little comforts like candy, bottles of juice, and CDs surrounded us. It could have been two days of fast food, or an overdose of over-the-counter meds, or lack of sleep, but I felt sicker than a dog. A cold had jumped me back during finals. Staying up all night to pack Amy’s apartment hadn’t helped. Even though I was armed with enough pills, lozenges, syrup, and capsules to hallucinate, the cold wouldn’t go. I let down my window. Icy December air at 65 mph stung my nostrils, leaving me a little less nauseous.
“Could you put the window up, honey?” Amy asked. “I’m freezing.”
I looked down at her body, curled up under a cheap faux-Navajo blanket on the reclined passenger seat. “Well, can I leave it cracked? I don’t feel so good.”
She didn’t move under her blanket. “I think your body’s upset because I’m moving out to Los Angeles.”
I smirked. “Well, if anyone knows my body, it’d be you.” Lascivious remarks were a reflexive response when she got that sugary. Amy seemed to make every moment we were together into a scene scripted by drunken Hallmark Card hacks. Sometimes it made me feel so special, while other times I thought I was just a prop in her grand staging of what a relationship should be.
Amy acted shocked. Whipping her head at me, she said, “Chris! What would your mom say if she heard you?”
“I think she heard both of us. Remember when you stayed over at Thanksgiving?”
“Hmph! Don’t be so crude.” Amy rolled over and ducked further under her blanket so that only her long, red curls were showing.
I stared down the highway. “Going back to sleep?” Amy nodded. “Do you mind if I put on some music, honey?” I half-whispered. It would be another day of not talking about tomorrow.
“Just as long as it’s something soft,” mumbled Amy. “No Van Halen.” But her breathing said she would be out for most of the morning.
We were done. We hadn’t said it yet. There was too much passion left in the tank. So I took heart in the stupid, little things as proof it couldn’t last. If I had an itch to hear a song, I scratched it. But she always had to dictate the music. Those are the little things that make you bristle and want to leave the room. But why should we have spent our last days bickering? It’s like she said. Enjoy it. I’m not sure how she meant that.
Early morning rush hour had been pretty thick in St. Louis. We were just getting out onto open freeway now. I fumbled under the seat for my Discman, peeking at the road through the steering wheel. The last thing I needed was to wreck Amy’s car along with our relationship. I fished out the CD player and wedged it between my legs on the driver’s seat. Even if she’d been awake, Amy wouldn’t complain about Dylan being too loud. So I threw in the third Biograph disc, skipped to track two, “Up to Me,” and popped the ‘repeat’ button. Listening to a song twenty times in a row was a little habit of mine that drove Amy nuts. She was sleeping.
“Everything went from bad to worse. Money never changed a thing. / Death kept followin’, trackin’ us down. At least I heard your bluebird sing.”
Death felt like her parents waiting for me in L.A. There would be awkward conversation, followed by an awkward dinner. Then comes the night under their roof, trying not to have sex with Amy. Finally, an early flight would take me back to the cold, and a second semester as a senior with three uncompleted majors. Of course, Amy’s little sister had informed her parents that Amy and I were “doing it.” Maybe dinner at their house would make a one-way ticket to Dayton look better.
“If I’d thought about it I never would have done it.” Bob’s voice bumbled out of the speakers I’d put in Amy’s station wagon for her. She was so proud of her car. She’d spent all weekend in the school library digging through Consumer Reports, finding stats that she would brag about whenever talking about her Volvo. I had to admit; even its ugly yellow paint job had grown on me. So had Amy, but now we were going to be 2,000 miles away from each other. It was a fact sitting in the middle of my life, and it wasn’t going anywhere. I had to move it. I had to move her. But how do you resist the girl who had forced our University to legally change its mascot from “The Ragin’ Injuns” to “The Fighting Squirrels?”
I tuned back in on the road and the song. Dylan sang on while the landscape turned browner as we sped south and west. It didn’t look like things were going to turn green again anytime during the rest of our drive.
Eventually, I shut the CD player off. Things are pretty damn sad when I start reading my life into song lyrics. At least I hadn’t been listening to Guns N’ Roses. What was I so upset about? That I knew a wonderful woman, who had wanted me in her bed every day for a semester? Amy shifted in her sleep, leaving her elfin face peeking out over the blanket’s edge. I tried to keep one eye on the highway, and one eye on the freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose, but had to give up. I sighed and looked back out on the road, trying to ignore the burning in my throat that wanted to cough. I didn’t want to wake up Amy.
Amy slept through lunch. I chewed some of those red and white striped mints she kept in her non-smoker’s ashtray. They got washed down with what was left of my Coke. Skipping lunch, I might be able to pick up almost a hundred miles. We had to keep driving.
85 mph on an empty highway is a strange place to feel trapped. Our momentum was carrying us right to the Pacific Ocean. I wanted to drive non-stop, because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d promised Amy to get her there. The promise was all I had left. So we slipped through the cold, sunny day. In less than two days, the beautiful woman next to me would wake up to a new life on the beach. I would fly back to the snow.
At three in the afternoon, Amy woke. She insisted we stop driving and get something to eat. We pulled off of I-40, past a sign that said ADULT! DANCERS! I thought of the fat salesman at the airport. We found a fast food place, for an early dinner of two burgers, fries, milkshakes, and bad conversation. She tried to explain again the new job at her dad’s company. It was adjusting, or allocating, or assessing, one of those vague business verbs that I never understood. After dinner, Amy drove quietly to Amarillo. I tried to sleep.
We finally found a Red Roof Inn, where I unfolded my body on the queen-size bed. After the marathon driving, my waist and knees were permanently cramped at ninety-degree angles. I lay there with a book. It was tough to read with my eyes closed. Amy was phoning her parents. Every time I thought about opening the book, I heard Amy’s voice rising again on her side of the conversation.
“No! Chris and I are sleeping in separate beds. His parents were worried about that too. Would you rather I drove by myself? Why not just paint a bulls-eye on my back for rapists and murders? ‘Young, white female is traveling alone.’ No, I will not ask him to pay for a separate room! I’m not going to make him pay for everything too. Quit worrying!” Amy had spent twenty minutes doing damage control with her parents. The one person I should be talking to was yelling at her parents long-distance. I slapped on my headphones, and thumbed up the volume on Fair Warning.
Amy hung up the phone, then plopped down next to me on the bed. I sighed, took my headphones off, making sure to act like a real asshole about it. But Amy was on the verge of tears after shouting at her parents for half an hour. I dropped the attitude, so that I could hold her. Everything else in her life was screwed up, and I couldn’t pile on too. It tore me up to see her biting her lip, to watch her shoulders try not to shake. She should stay back in Ohio. But how could I ask her not to go? She had a diploma and a job in sunny California. I was only a semester behind her, yet had no idea when I would finish, what I would do, or where I would live. I did know I would never be like Amy.
“What are you thinking about?”
What I was thinking was this, I was stuck and I couldn’t undo it. I was thinking, if I ever have kids, I promise to tell them the most dangerous thing in the world is falling in love. I was thinking, you have a better chance at a long, healthy life driving blindfolded from Dayton to Los Angeles than if you fall in love too easy. How could I say that I should never have gone to bed with Amy, when I loved her? But how could I say I loved her, when I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life with her?
So I just said, “Nothing,” and we lay together all night.
About eight hundred miles later, we were in Kingman, Arizona, on the cusp of California. I was so sick of driving and carrying five pounds of snot in my sinuses. I fell asleep in front of Sports Center before Amy was even undressed. As good as I felt when I woke, it turned to shit when I saw the sun up in the sky. The clock on the wall said ten o’ clock. That meant checkout was an hour away.
“Wake up!”
Amy kept her eyes closed, but put a dopey smile on her face. She stretched her arms to the top of the headboard before kicking the covers off her naked body. “Surprise! You’ve been driving so much. You packed up my apartment. And you’re sick. So I thought we should stay half the day before leaving for mom and dad’s. You know, take advantage of the pool, the bed, each other.”
“But we’ll get charged for another day!” A stupid retort in the face of sex. I was really out of it.
“It’s okay. Daddy gave me an advance to cover the trip.” She tugged at my boxers.
“Stop it! I’m still mad. You didn’t even ask me what I wanted.”
When Amy rolled on top of me, I had a better idea of what I really wanted. “I need to be with you, Chris. I know you’re not gone yet. I need to know that.” We flipped back to her side of the bed, and I quit thinking about when we’d get to Los Angeles.
After, we sat not talking on the powder blue steps in the shallow end of the pool. Our bags were packed and dry clothes waited on the bed. I was as relaxed as I could be.
By the time we pulled into L.A., I wasn’t talking to Amy out of sheer vehicular frustration. We sat on Interstate 15 for three hours. Cars followed one another through the mountains and into the valley. When we pulled up next to a palm tree in front of her parents’ house, I wished I were back in the middle of eight lanes, cussing out that damn Mercury Merkur with the twitchy brake lights, safely never going anywhere.
Sometimes things aren’t as bad as you think they’ll be. Meeting Amy’s parents was just as uncomfortable as I’d imagined. The back of my t-shirt was soaked with sweat. Amy had insisted on shutting off the car’s AC. I couldn’t disagree with her, since letting it run for three hours in standstill traffic didn’t seem too wise. But I was annoyed at having to look like a sweaty, rumpled pig.
Mrs. Jesperson gave me a perfunctory handshake, then began bustling around the kitchen. Mr. Jesperson gave me a more thorough handshake. He peppered me with questions about the Browns’ season. I followed the duck and weave of bonding, dropping the names of lesser-known position players, criticizing play calling, and discussing the approaching playoffs. In the kitchen, I heard Mrs. Jesperson comment on Amy’s weight three times in less than ten minutes.
Looking at the cuckoo clocks, Grand Canyon knick-knacks, and other heirlooms, I felt an odd rush of irritation. Seeing this family in Santa Monica was like watching a lumbering pack of football players advance from the frozen turf and mud of an Ohio November to some arbitrary Pasadena January. The fact that Mr. and Mrs. Jesperson didn’t belong here, that Amy shouldn’t be following them, continued to rub raw the shredded nerves that had survived the L.A. freeway.
Amy called us to dinner. I’d been away from her for almost half an hour. It was a weird sensation after being together every minute for over three days. Everyone sat down at the kitchen table. We attacked the kielbasa, potatoes, and green beans Mrs. Jesperson had boiled up on the stove. I fended off some questions about my alleged future. Amy stepped in to defend me from her parents.
After dinner, Amy and I were sitting in front of the television. Mrs. Jesperson stationed herself by the set. “Chris, I just wanted to let you know I made the bed in the guest room,” she said with crystalline enunciation. “You’ll be sleeping there tonight.” I could see where Amy got her lack of subtlety.
Before I went to the guest room, I brushed my teeth in the bathroom. Amy slid in and shut the door behind her. “What are you doing here?” I asked around my toothbrush.
“Since my parents won’t let us sleep together in my room, I figure we’ll have to do it in the bathroom.”
“Amy!” It was all I could do to keep a rabid trail of fluoride foam from spilling everywhere. I suavely spit out my toothpaste. When I turned back from the sink, Amy had already whipped her t-shirt over her head. She shimmied out of my old boxers, the ones she’d kept without ever asking. “You can’t be serious.”
She sat on the counter in front of me. The pale strap marks from where her swimsuit had crossed her back were reflected in the mirror. I hadn’t even known her during the summer that tanned her body. Before the next summer, I’d be gone.
I shook my head clear. “What about your parents?”
“What about them? I don’t care about my parents. I want you.” She tugged my t-shirt over my head, and everything went dark. “When are we going to see each other again?”
I looked at the floor. On a trip where everything seemed not quite right, this moment seemed so wrong. Whatever confusion my mind felt, my body had already responded to Amy. She knew what to do after that. We just tried not to make too much noise.
Breakfast the next morning was rushed and absent of conversation. Amy wanted to eat at the airport, but Mrs. Jesperson insisted on cooking. I made polite good-byes. They thanked me for accompanying their daughter on the long drive. Maybe they really were thankful. I doubt they’d have been thrilled if I’d stayed another night.
On our way to LAX, we stopped at the beach. It was only a few blocks from her folks’ house. I wanted to see the Pacific before I left. Despite all the mucus in my nose, I could smell the ocean. Amy and I reached for each other’s hand at the same time. The fitness freaks and homeless types were out, but otherwise we were by ourselves. The spandex set swerved around us, speeding along their independent flight plans. The bums stayed hunkered down underneath their sleeping bags, on top of their possessions.
Near the water was a discarded Snapple bottle. I tossed it from hand to hand. At least that way I didn’t have to see Amy’s face when I said, “You don’t need a boyfriend on the other side of the country. You’re starting your life out here, and I’m still stuck at school.” Amy hadn’t interrupted me yet. It unnerved me more than any words I’d feared.
She stared at me. Her eyes squinted, but I couldn’t tell whether it was on account of the wind or tears. Amy took the empty tea bottle from my slack hands. “We’re still going to talk, right? I can call you at school, and all that?”
Her knees bent, kind of sidesaddle. She rinsed the bottle in the water lapping at our feet, then dug into the sand with it. She wrenched the lid back on, giving the bottle to me. It was filled half with sand and half with water. “Take this back to Ohio with you, will you? Just to put on your desk at school? So you won’t forget about me?”
“Amy, I won’t forget you.”
We hugged so that we wouldn’t have to cry in front of each other. A larger wave came up, splashing us. It soaked the bottom of my shorts and her skirt. I backhanded tears from my cheek. “Damn. We better get to the airport.”
Our goodbye at the airport was more emotional. The plane was quick leaving, otherwise I would’ve spent the whole day crying at LAX. We had plenty of kleenex from the car. I left the cold medicine yet that day. I didn’t want to feel better.
It happened in St. Louis. There was a fifteen-minute layover. I rummaged through my bookbag, my only piece of luggage. The first thing I touched was the bottle Amy gave me on the beach. When I brought it out, the speck of ocean was heavy in my hand. All the sand had settled. I turned it around, happy the water had cleared. A small cloud of sand exploded into the water. Out crawled a squat shellfish. When I was a kid, I caught crawdads every summer in the Mad River. This thing had no tail or large claws. It seemed to be all thorax.
Two more bizarre crustaceans scuttled out of the sand. The stewardess announced it was time to board for Dayton. I dropped the bottle into the trash. I staggered through the narrow aisle to my seat, thinking one thing. I had done wrong.