Between start and finish, there was a brain bleed, a road, and a destination with spirits—a true enough order of things, to be sure, but not the way I tell it, because this is a story, not a diary, told as best I can.

I left Fallon by turning right onto US95 toward Las Vegas. It was early in a dry desert spring. The Dodge burned gas at 10 miles per gallon—a criminal footprint—but it pulled a fiberglass trailer as fast as I wanted to go. I drove during the day and slept at night on its fold-down dinette. My back hurt from the seat cushion mattress, but the morning was bright, the air clear, and the road was straight and flat.

I filled up early. I wasn’t in a hurry and wanted coffee. I’d driven US95 north from Vegas once before—a high-speed connection to I-40, the interstate that ran parallel to the cracked remnants of Route 66, once called “the mother road” across our continent. It waited for me the next day.

I was 11 years old the last time I crossed the country in a car, traveling west to east. There was no interstate then—just the two-lane Route 66 and a long summer’s drive. I remember hand-painted “Last Chance Gas” signs warning of the distance between filling stations. We drove from Long Beach, California, to Norfolk, Virginia, where my parents bought a house. I sat in the back of a big-finned Buick with my sisters, traveling home from my father’s last duty station in Hawaii to a new life in Virginia, where he would retire. It was summer, and I was young. Now, it’s spring, and I am old.

Mike waited when I pulled up to the pump. I said, “You look familiar.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”  It was Mike.

He’d been dead for years.  I knew it was him. He looked as he had when we met for lunch 30 years ago in Ghent wearing jeans, t-shirt, and the golf cap covering a bald spot he blamed on his two years wearing an Army helmet.  He hated his enlistment to avoid the draft.

His sister called when he died.  I sent a fruit basket.  Food is better than flowers, and Oregon is famous for pears.  I didn’t send anything to the widow. I figured he was my first acid flashback, a delusion.

Bad trips scared me a couple of times.   I ate LSD habitually  back in the day.  Some trips were exceptional.  Four of us tripped together: Mike, me, Carter, Scott, and Rick.  That makes five, but Mike in the Army a couple of years, and Rick and I partnered when he was gone.  Four was as many as could fit into my ‘68 Mustang. Carter was the shaman pn whom  we relied when trips got intense. He had the longest hair among us and looked the part of a psychedelic guide.  “Don’t worry, you’ll start to dig it,” he’d say.  As high as the rest of us, when he spoke, we listened. Scott was his younger brother. He wanted to be a rock and roll star.

Mike’s presence was welcome. He wasn’t real, couldn’t be.  He was dead and buried in Norfolk, dirt shoveled and mound  leveled. Fate killed him, a man who never lied to me or treated me wrong, and left me alive. His friendship anchored me.

Mike didn’t offer to pump my gas. No one pumps gas for you in Nevada. Oregon stations have attendants, a perk for the frictionally unemployed, but I left those stations behind.

Four years ago, I had a stroke, and seeing ghosts doesn’t bother me much. I talked with spirits when I floated about in a morphine haze in the hospitals intensive care. They convinced me not to fear death though I’m not certain what we actally said to one another.  Right before my high school graduation, my father’s ghost visited me, and I don’t recall what he said either.  The universe is infinite, and all things are possible.  Regardless dead brain cells, I recognized Mike. We knew each other as juveniles and parted as adults. I was the one with the car, so I drove.  We traveled north to DC and south to New Orleans.  Our friendship withered over 30 years.

I welcomed his visit on this long ride. I read once that “fate is a whimsical cart to which we are fastened.” We walk beside it or are dragged behind. “The trend is your friend”  suits my philosophy.  When he was alive, I phoned him more than he called me. Our conversations were sporadic. Few old friends ever called, except Scott.  He called when someone died. Like me, Scott headed west.   We lived in the same time zone, until he moved back east to North Carolina’s Outer Banks where he gigged clubs and restaurats playing his guitar and singing.

Mike climbed into the passenger seat.  “What took you so long?”

My vehicle was a crossover SUV with a cavernous interior. Its rear seats folded to carry as much cargo as I wanted for a continental loop west to east and back again.  I thought about answering him but some questions are asked with no needed answer, and this was one of them.  Guilt and evasion would have weighted my response.  Anyway, he was the one waiting at a gas pump in the Mojave Desert.

“This ain’t your Mustang.”

That car was a ‘68 coupe that took us wherever we wanted to go—until it died in the middle of an Alabama intersection. I pushed it to a gas station, caught a ride, and traded it for a monster Chrysler.

“Thirty years.  I thought you were dead and gone. We might as well roll.”

I topped off the tank, started the engine, and pulled out onto US95’s long, straight road.  The air was dry, the temperature warm, the sunshine bright.  My eyes scanned gray and drab green sagebrush dotting the sand on both sides of the road, a bland landscape without forests, mountains, or streams.

“How you doing, Mike?” I asked the dead.

“Been better. Been worse. You know how it goes,”

I didn’t know how life went on his plane of existence, but it was just small talk.  If you ‘stay too long in the desert, you will go insane’  was told to me by a man who toured Afghanistan three times.. He lived in Portland, brewed his own beer, faceted high-desert sunstones into gems, and lived with his daughter.  It was a good life.  He seemed happy though he had funny eyes. the kind that looked a little screwy when angled just so.

If Mike’s appearance was proof of the desert’s effect, I didn’t care. Sanity is overrated.  If desert life caused mental instability, I wasn’t going to linger that long.  At 70 miles per hour, the geography would change soon enough.  I once feared mental illness.  Feeling discontent and melancholic. I saw therapists, social workers, psychiatrists, took medicines, and told my story endlessly, until it lost meaning. One psychiatrist even yawned while writing me a prescription for Zoloft. They seemed less rational than me, so I quit therapy.

Insanity can be traumatic, especially when it’s not self-induced. My dad was led away by Navy corpsmen one night in Norfolk. He spent the rest of his life sporadically in mental wards and VA facilities. He said electroshock treatments were the worst—they wiped his memory.

Mike rummaged through the cab and muttered, “What music do you have?”

I pointed to the radio and the MP3 player.  Technology had advanced since my Mustang’s eight-track.  I lost that when a thief ripped it from out when I was parked outside my Norfolk apartment.

“Are you here to guide me somewhere my road atlas doesn’t show?”

He said, “You wouldn’t understand. Don’t fuck around with questions.” And that was that.

Talking to the deceased begged questions: are we caterpillars in a chrysalis; does a butterfly remember being a caterpillar? Transformed or metamorphosis, what’s the difference?  I wanted to know about Jesus and should I fear damnation.  These were really good questions but I kept quiet. Mike wasn’t a Sunday School teacher, and I hadn’t planned for his visit. If he were here to guide me, I needed time to think about it. He was as real as my imagination, and we drove an asphalt highway that sliced through sagebrush and sand, disappearing into the distant haze. Rain clouds rarely crossed the mountains to the west.  We passed in their shadow at 80 miles per hour. Who was I to question?  Job questioned God in the whirlwind, God said, “where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” And I wasn’t a faithful servant.   I thought better not to ask what I would not understand or attempt to carry any truths he might share.  Some questions are better left unasked

Mike was born quiet, but I was born vocal. Death was certain, and he walked with spirits.  A spirit world was better than ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or so I imagined but I’d have to wait and see.

I wanted a conversation.  “Remember the Yashica you sold to me for 20 dollars and a bag of pot?”  I took a picture of hime with it on the Currituck Ferry in eastern North Carolina.  He was high, his wild hair blowing and storm clouds behind him, a good picture, and he was in focus.

“Yeah, I remember. You owe me 20 bucks.”

“You know that was fifty years ago.” I wondered how long that debt had been on his mind. People are funny about money.  “I’ve got the cash,” I said, “but you’ll have to calculate the interest”

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t need it. You brought it up.”

“My bad.”

I mentioned the camera so I could tell the story of how I lost it.  I was on a field trip with my college history class near the end of my Alabama academic adventure on the Cahaba river, my last field trip. The professor finagled canoes, and we spent the a couple of days capsizing them in the muddy river.  We spent the night on a sandbar.  I lay wet in a tent and heard the professor having sex in an adjacent tent.  He and the student were married to others, and their passion for one another sounded hot.  I was envious. The trip ended the next morning. I’m not a wilderness person.

Mike stayed quiet. I left Norfolk to attend that obscure teacher’s college.  He stayed home and went a different way.  Alabama was my experience, not his. It separated us.  Still, we had hours to go before Las Vegas and the next day’s jump onto I-40 East near Kingman, Arizona.  I decided to talk about Norfolk.

“Do you remember why you told the teacher to ‘get screwed’? You picked up your test paper from his desk, muttered that on the way to your seat, and it screwed up our lives—yours worse than mine?”

We met in the seventh grade. We lived close by, walked to each other’s houses, knew each other’s families, and rode city buses together. High school was difficult for both of us. We shared classes and occasional conduct notices. I failed geometry and biology, and Mike was expelled. My fourth grade classmates in Waikiki said much worse but we were in Norfolk, Virginia and our teacher was a football player on Norfolk’s minor league team. Teaching history was his second job, and Mike insulted him so he was expelled.  That day, I went with a classmate to intercede on Mike’s behalf. Neither of us liked the teacher. Fortunately, Bud had good grades without conduct notices or suspensions.  I had conduct notices, suspensions and truancy issues.  Though Mike being my best friend, I wouldn’t have gone without Bud’s support.  He was more heroic.  I had little to lose.  I knew the vice principal.  He was a former football coach turned administrator—a tall, overweight man with close-cropped hair. He walked the halls like a wrestler who could rip your arms from their sockets.  I had been sent to his office more than once.

Bud and I sat on aluminum chairs in front of his desk in his small office a short distance down a hall from the administrators and student trustees who barricaded themselves behind a counter beyond which the uninvited dared not pass. He listened to us but Mike was unforgiven and expelled at in the tenth grade at 15 years old.  The football playing teacher didn’t return the following year. I never knew if our complaint had anything to do with that or if Norfolk’s minor league football team found a better place kicker.  Mike should’ve gone to college.

I stayed in school, graduated, did well financially, married, raised children, and retired with money. Mike didn’t. I am treated kindly by children and grandchildren. Mike had none. I could have been a better friend, but ‘The road goes both ways.’

No matter how empathetic I tpretend to be, my thoughts drift back to me.

“Yeah, I remember.  I told my mother. She told my father. He told me to find work. Where’s your Deep Purple tape?”

I welcomed the question—it broke my reverie.  I pointed to the MP3 player.  It was wired to the radio, ancient technology but more recent though than eight-track that filled the Mustang with sound.  I had hours of music, from  Beatles to disco.  He could figure it out.  He fiddled with the MP3 player’s arrows and buttons, then spun the radio dial. Jesus and country music always came in loud and clear.

Mike was technically adept before it was cool, the first person I knew who owned a handheld, battery-operated calculator.  He cut brush for land surveyors then later drew maps.  He bought the earliest generation Apple computer, and hauled around a  a Sony TV as a monitor. At the height of his career, he assembled computer-aided design equipment for survey firms and drew city maps.

Billboards advertised a brothel next to Area 51. An entrepreneur pimp set up shop near where government scientists tried to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft.  With both hookers and aliens, it was a destination resort.  Beside the billboard stood a metal silo with a red fuse sticking from its conical peak.  It called itself the “World’s Largest M-80 Firecracker.”  I pulled off the road to take a photograph.

Mike said, “Let’s go to the spaceship whorehouse.”

“You kow you’re a ghost, right.”

“Yeah, but think about it.”

I had miles to drive.   Aliens and prostitutes weren’t part of my agenda. I took the photo.

Back in the day, neither of us had luck with women. The “Summer of Love” passed by without our participation. He was more vocal about his lusts and should have been born with furry legs and goat feet.  Mythical gods and demigods never seemed to have trouble getting laid. He should have been a saytr.

I cranked up the radio’s volume and thought about my Mustang, a red coupe with 289 cubic inches of V8 motor. It hit 115 mph and left most traffic in its rearview.  Norfolk to Richmond took two hours, DC took four, and New York City took eight. Mike and I were rarely passed.  We spiked our heads with LSD. Trees lined the interstate like picket fences.  Towns we passed flickered lights between them. We stayed in our lane, windows down and the music playing loud.  Mike summed up our rides one night when he said, “I figured it out. It’s a race.”