Welcome to the conclusion of my U.S. Highway 1 adventure highlights. As I drove further south, I crossed not only state lines but also the fine line between confusion and outright annoyance. For example . . .

CONNECTICUT

My motel room in Old Saybrook defies description – but what the hell, I’ll have a go at it anyway. First of all, the room smells like curry. I don’t mind this, but I do find it somewhat bizarre. Second of all, the decor could give Helen Keller a migraine – striped grey wallpaper on one wall, fire-engine red flocked wallpaper on the other two walls, bright blue velour bedspreads on each bed (and did I mention the waterbed, onto which I heaved my suitcase without knowing that the mattress didn’t consist of springs and stuffing, only to touch off a tsunami that threatened to drown my luggage and made my stuffed tiger quite seasick indeed?), and barf-green carpeting. When I wake up the next morning from my dreams of chicken tikka masala, the room temperature has dropped precipitously, but I have to get out of the warm bed because the room has no clock, and I couldn’t ask for a wake-up call because the phone had no instructions on it, so if I don’t get up I’ll fall asleep again. I shower. The towels have the absorbency, and the consistency, of concrete. As I scrape the moisture off of my body, I spy a tiny sign that reads “PLEASE PLACE SHOWER CURTAIN INSIDE WHEN USING SHOWER.” Excuse me? Do I get to leave a sign of my own, like “PLEASE REMOVE MILDEW FROM SHOWER CURTAIN WHEN PRETENDING TO CLEAN BATHROOM,” or perhaps “PLEASE PROVIDE REMOTE CONTROL FOR TELEVISION”? Or how about “PLEASE EXTERMINATE ANY RODENTS THAT MIGHT FEEL THE NEED TO DON CLOGS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AND DANCE THE HORA IN THE CEILING WHILE GUESTS ATTEMPT TO GET FIVE CONSECUTIVE MINUTES OF SLEEP”?

Every single radio station has the Seinfeld finale bit firmly between its teeth and refuses to let go. If I hear one more idiot DJ giving away Elaine’s dirty underwear or interviewing Jason Alexander’s kids’ nanny’s neighbor, I don’t know what. I plan to watch the show and everything, but can we all just breathe deeply and remember that it is, in fact, JUST a show? Please?

I get lost. While trying to turn around, I thank the Connecticut Highway Authority for waiting until the last possible moment to post a sign saying which direction U.S. 1 goes, so that I get into the wrong lane and have to wander around in the sketchiest part of Bridgeport, because I really enjoy wasting valuable time in this manner. Well, all except for the “enjoy” part.

Darien, Connecticut. The first Starbucks I’ve seen in days passes on the right. Then I have to swing into the right lane to make way for the Darien Police, on their way to arrest someone who stepped out of the house without a pink and green whale belt on.

I get lost again, this time in Stamford, and strangely enough I wind up on a street where my uncle used to live. I have to turn around in the driveway of a golf club; the fossils in their plaid pants give me the evil eye. Hmmm – should I turn down the volume on the Gary Glitter song blasting out of the windows? Nahhhh. When I find my way back to Route 1, I remember that Paul Revere used this road to gallop his message from Boston to Philadelphia, following an existing Indian trail that became the Old Post Road. He had to have made better time than I have today, not least because the Indians probably knew how to use a goddamn turn signal.

NEW YORK

I get lost three times in Port Chester and cross and re-cross the New York-Connecticut border no fewer than seven times. On top of that, the donuts I ate this morning have begun to raise a few objections, and I have to stop a couple of times in nasty gas stations to use the bathroom. I rumble along and into the Bronx, which takes forever to get through and reminds me of Rhode Island because I should get through it in twenty minutes but instead it takes two hours and I rip out most of my hair. I nearly get smeared by a St. Ides Malt Liquor truck, and then on the George Washington Bridge approach I almost disappear into several potholes, and then I proceed to endanger the lives of myself and others by trying to photograph the skyline while driving.

NEW JERSEY

Everything looks used and gritty and hard up here: cracked pavement, peeling paint, and nonstop grime. The neglect seems more willful. Why would anyone ever stop at these slimy motels (complete with euphemistic “day rates”) and diners? Did everyone just get together and decide, “What the hell – let’s live like pigs”? A guy at the side of the road does a weird dance, holding his gym bag and dancing from side to side as though he has water in his ear. Maybe he has Tourette’s.

After rattling over the Pulaski Skyway – New Jersey’s answer to soapbox derby – I feel a bit more sanguine about things. I know this stretch of road well, and as I weave in and out of the truck traffic through the Industrial Fields, I pass the Office of Weights and Measures. What function does this office serve, might I ask? “Welcome to the Office of Weights and Measures. Can I help you?” “Yes. Does this weigh a pound?” “Yes.” “Thank you.” I don’t get it.

I get a room at the Red Roof Inn. It has a remote and a complimentary Sega, and a spacious and clean bathroom, but the king-sized bed occupies the entire square footage of the room itself, which means that I have to jump in the door, bounce off the bed, and land in the bathroom on the rebound if I have to pee. Conversely, when I want to leave the room, I have to open the door first while kneeling on the bed, back up to the towel rack in the bathroom, carefully calibrate my jump so that I don’t fall short and land on the table or bounce too far and sail over the balcony railing and into the parking lot below, and then spppprrrrroooiinnnnnnggg onto the bed and out onto the balcony. I try various other strategies for crossing the bed, but crawling over it takes too long and the Starsky-and-Hutch slide doesn’t work because I get tangled up in the bedspread. Just staying on the bed and watching TV seems like the best idea, so that’s what I do. The next morning, while arming myself with complimentary coffee, I overhear a man recounting the entire plot of the previous night’s 90210 episode to the woman behind the counter. I can’t decide which is sadder, his doing so or the fact that I figure out what he’s talking about after hearing only a couple of sentences.

PENNSYLVANIA

I whiz through Philadelphia. This trip really takes me, and not the other way around, which this day proves. I wind up in Kennett Square, the mushroom capital of the world, a couple of hours later, and visit the Mushroom Museum. I learn some interesting facts about mushrooms and promptly forget them as soon as I get back into the car, but the gift shop rules. Oh, wait, I remember something. The Japanese call the maitake mushroom the “dancing” mushroom. I tremble to think what useful fact got shunted out of my brain by that maitake item, but whatever.

I stop in Oxford, where a number of my ancestors lived and died. I stop in at the police station to nose around, and a couple of helpful older ladies direct me to the cemetery, and one of them rides up with me to the office to look for my relatives. We find the graves of Buntings past without too much trouble. “This family’s been gone from here for some time,” she says. “I know,” I say. She asks what brings me here. I tell her about my trip as I drive her back to the station. “Good for you,” she says. “I keep meaning to walk the Appalachian Trail but I haven’t gotten to it yet.” Then she asks me if I’ve read William Least Heat-Moon, which makes me smile because nobody outside of my family ever knows about Heat-Moon, and invites me back for the history walk in August.

MARYLAND

I cross the Mason-Dixon line. A flag flies at half-mast on my right – please don’t tell me that this commemorates the passing of Seinfeld. Please. Then for no reason I remember that I got my car eight years ago today, so I sing “Happy Birthday” to my car, and Shadow chooses not to punish this off-key serenade by catching a flat, for which I feel grateful.

Madonna Motors, Inc. Okay – do they manufacture everything in Detroit but pretend it comes from Mayfair?

“Baltimore: A Nuclear-Free Zone.” I appreciate the sign but I have to wonder if other major metropolitan areas know something that they haven’t told us. I get horribly lost in Baltimore, in a neighborhood so bad that I don’t see another human being for ten minutes and I don’t see another car not on blocks for half an hour. At last I have to give up and take 695; call it cheating if you like, but I can’t very well drive U.S. 1 from top to bottom if I get shot in the head.

VIRGINIA

A guy in the passenger seat of a nappy yellow Buick makes eyes at me. I smile politely. I can feel him staring at me for the next five miles. Yuck. I try to stare straight ahead, knowing that making eye contact will doom me, but every time I stop at a traffic light, the Napmobile pulls up next to me and Rico Suave leans out the window to get a good look. Bleccchhh. Finally, the car turns off, but unfortunately it turns off at the motel where I wanted to stop for the night. Bastards.

I stop for the night, get unpacked, and zip across U.S. 1 to a nearby Food Lion for a microwave dinner and a bottle of beer. A sign on an access road hawks “FIREWORKS CIGARETTES PEANUTS HAMS.” Interesting configuration, I must say – if you don’t blow your head off, try lung cancer, and if that doesn’t work, clog your arteries. I watch the Seinfeld finale and cannot believe how much it basically sucks. The next morning, after showering – not the easiest task since someone installed the nozzle at about five feet off the ground, which means that I have to do a bellydancer back bend to rinse the shampoo out of my hair, not that I mind since my back has assumed a scoliotic hump after nearly a week of driving twelve hours a day – I watch a few minutes of The Today Show while packing and find that Frank Sinatra has died. The Seinfeld brouhaha probably killed him.

I get some coffee in Caroline. This experience serves as the paradigm for every time I emerge from the car in the state of Virginia: I get out of the car, some fat pasty woman in a tight pink sweatsuit with stains on it eyes me down and sucks her teeth (oh, excuse me, I meant to say “her tooth”), some other fat pasty woman behind the counter gives me a look so hostile that I check my t-shirt to make sure it doesn’t say “General Sherman’s Barn Burners” or something, I ask for coffee or directions or a bathroom key, Fat Pasty Woman #2 acts as though I had just requested the loan of one of her ovaries, and as soon as I push the door open, they start talking about me like I can’t hear them. Look, I apologize for not having the lithe figure of a potato and more children than teeth at the age of 25, but not all of us view moonshine and an ass with a zip code as goals to strive for, so learn some fucking manners, you snaggle-
toothed doorstop, because the last time I looked, we won the war. (Memo to offended Southerners: don’t bother. First of all, you know you make fun of New Jersey, so save it for the judge. Second of all, I travelled through quite a few southern states and nothing ever approached the rudeness and undisguised suspicion and hostility that I had to deal with in Virginia. In fact, most people proved unfailingly polite and pleasant – a little less worldly than their northern counterparts sometimes, perhaps, but always friendly and helpful. I don’t know what goes on along U.S. 1 in Virginia, but it has made the people that live there dumb and mean.) In Caroline, I have to endure the contempt of the proprietress when I ask where to find coffee cups, but this same woman listens patiently to another customer debating whether to feed her dog a banana or a candy bar. “I thought about getting him a candy bar, but every time I feed him a candy bar, he throws up, and he’s been doing so good today,” the customer said, and then she bought a banana. Um, ever heard of Dog Chow?

For fun, try driving through a small town like Henricus with the Ramones blasting.

NORTH CAROLINA

I love country music; I can learn the song after hearing one verse and sing along with it even if I’ve never heard it before. Today’s listening highlights include “Just Because She’s Too Good To Be True, Doesn’t Mean She’s Too Good To Be True To You” and “I’m The Fool Who’s In Love With The Fool Who’s Still In Love With You.” I see almost nothing worth stopping for in the entire state – junky things abound, but not things that really grab my attention. I do see a car with the license plate “PRMSKPRS,” which scares me so deeply that I slam on the brakes and cross two lanes to get away from the guy.

In the bathroom of an Exxon Mart, I try to buy the Gentleman’s Love Kit for sale in the vending machine (yes, in the ladies’ room. Go figure). The kit includes an exotic condom, Swedish massage oil, and climax control lotion, but after I go to the trouble of asking the cashier for change of a dollar and traipsing back into the john to get the kit, the machine eats my seventy-five cents and doesn’t give me anything. Plus, on my way out the door, an eighty-year-old man with a claw for a hand and a Cub Scout uniform on spits a sunflower seed hull onto my sandal and it sticks there and I don’t want to touch it. I literally run to the car after this incident and turn up the volume on NPR, which I can get for some reason no matter how far into the sticks I roam, and learn about the flamingo named Pink Floyd that lives at the Great Salt Lake.

SOUTH CAROLINA

At the motel, I order a marinated breast of chicken, which comes with a “loaded” potato; this means that the potato arrives groaning under the weight of butter, sour cream, cheddar, bacon, and broccoli. I ask for just butter, and butter I get – a whole ice-cream scoop’s worth, perched on top of the potato like an unfinished snowman.

The next morning, I lug my crap out to the car, only to find that some kind soul has stuck a half-eaten Rice Krispie treat on Shadow’s windshield. It has already begun to sizzle in the morning sun. How charming.

I stop at a flea market and see the following things for sale: rope ($2); puppies; forks; hair relaxer; Garfield pencil holders; pastel ceramic cookie jars with butterflies on them; pirated videos; silver rings by the pound; trash cans with Peanuts characters on them; framed pictures of David Robinson; fruit-scented incense; magnets with cutesy slogans on them; neon plastic coin purses; the largest tomato in the South (no, I didn’t buy it, because I couldn’t fit it into the car); cut-glass jelly dishes; silk flowers that, despite being fake, managed to have wilted; and two little boys, the littler wearing a sign that said “little brother – $10 or best offer.” The merchandise falls into the usual flea market categories of “I had it lying around the house” and “it fell off the truck.”

A woman in a mini-mart asks me if my tattoo “hurted” when I got it. I give her the standard answer – sort of like getting your teeth drilled, but not as traumatic because it doesn’t happen inside your mouth – and she grimaces. “You must be crazy,” she tells me. Well, I took this trip, didn’t I?

GEORGIA

In Augusta I have car trouble and wind up making friends with the entire waiting room in a Meineke. A fresh-faced college grad sort of hits on me, which I manage to duck because I have to blow town as soon as they fix Shadow’s exhaust pipe. One woman advises me to wear baggier clothes. As usual, I meet the coolest people by going outside to smoke a cigarette.

A billboard reads, “REAL MEN GET CONSENT,” and provides the number of a rape crisis hotline. Snaps to Jefferson County, Georgia for that sign. I drive through quiet farmland with the windows open to give the AC a rest, and I blast Bryan Adams and sweat and smoke. The sun begins to go down. The guy in the truck in front of me throws an empty beer can out the window. Five minutes later, another one sails out. Has he picked now as the perfect time to empty trash out of his car – reeeealllly slowly – or has he been drinking them that fast? Take it easy on the Pabst, grandpa. I don’t want to get killed out here. He also has a bumper sticker reading “Coon Hunters Do It All Night.” Oh.

In Santa Claus, Georgia (“the city that loves children”), I stop to buy some postcards. I don’t think that a gas station, a motel, and a couple of feed lots really fits under the definition of “city,” but I can’t blame them for trying.

At King’s Roller Rink, a sign warns, “NO SEMIS ALLOWED.” I didn’t know truckers liked to roller-skate, but if they can handle a giant behemoth on eighteen wheels, it seems as though they wouldn’t do much damage strapping eight little wheels on their own feet, but what do I know. A painted posterboard a few miles later informs me that abortion stops a beating heart. Oh, really? Well, so do the bombs that pro-life psychos detonate at women’s health clinics. Welcome to the high road; please drive safely.

FLORIDA

Six minutes after I cross the state line, I almost get sideswiped by a stereotype – some old bat driving a huge Cadillac and peering over the dashboard under the weight of a huge blue perm. A man fishing off of a bridge has managed to get his line hung up in the only tree visible for miles. Nice job, Izaak Walton. The license plates have changed from Georgia peaches to Florida oranges. Why don’t Jersey plates have food on them? The DMV could put a little order of cheese fries in the middle or something.

I get lost in Jacksonville (apparently, as I learn from painful experience as well as from one of my books about U.S. 1, America’s largest city in square mileage). I can’t get a radio station that doesn’t play Christian rock. I wander through a dicey area populated by weedy lots and broken-down buildings and pregnant women riding dirt bikes. A little kid pushes his sister on a Big Wheel as fast as he can; I consider rolling down the window and asking him to give Shadow a push.

At the Starving Artists CafÈ, an old man in a beige short-sleeved buttondown shirt with poo-colored flowers on it and a John Deere hat on comes out the front door. Oh, my. One radio station, in the clutches of some sort of ë80s weekend, plays “Thriller,” and I laugh at the line where Michael Jackson says, “Girl, I could scare you more than any ghoul could ever dare try.” And how!

The Hawaiian Tropic Tanning Research Laboratories – I shudder to think of what goes on within those walls. Do test subjects lie in tanning beds all day, reading Cosmo and sipping tropical drinks? Do they put on suntan lotion and then jump in and out of a pool to see how long it takes to wear off?

A sign outside Titusville congratulates “Matt Hays, 1997 SAT Perfect Scorer.” Way to boost the tourist trade, folks. Other signs include “Retail Clams” (huh?), “Available – Exceptionally Clean Sand” (shouldn’t that go without saying?), and “Fight Truth Decay – Study The Bible Daily.” Help. Please let me get to Key West. Please. I see a number of shrines to Frank Sinatra as I drive. I also see a lot of signs for “All Nude Revues.” I love how they use the word “revue” – like they plan to do sketch comedy butt-naked.

At last, the Keys. Exposure to salt water has rendered many people unable to execute a safe left turn. I keep driving, feeling proud of myself and ready to treat myself to lobster and champagne. I reach the end of the road in Key West and the mile marker “0” sign and I stare at it for about five minutes until someone honks and I have to turn.

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