I have been hot in my days. I have been to New Orleans in the dead of summer when the air doesn’t move and you walk outside and immediately go back in to take yet another shower. I recently mucked out 12 pastures in Kanab Utah where the mercury on the side of the barn hit 108 degrees. I’ve been in the hospital with obnoxiously fevers and lived to tell the tale. But, I have never been so hot that I would ever take my clothes off in a club. But apparently that was all the rage when Nelly’s Hot in Herre climbed the charts in the summer of 2002.
Around January of that year, my friend Jesse told me that he was sick of living in Boston and needed a change and if I would move out to Portland Oregon with him. No way was my initial thought, I love it here. But after I thought about it a little bit longer, I wondered. Did I really love it here? I was madly in love with a man who married his abusive girlfriend instead of me. I was working for a company where I felt perpetually stagnant. I was sharing an apartment with two guys, one of whom was probably going to get married soon and the other who was more fucked up about his romantic life than I could ever dream. It seemed like most of my friends were pairing off and here I was 25, single, with a Bachelors of Science, and enough money in my savings account to make a change.
Let’s do it! I nearly screamed into the phone to him about a week after he initially proposed the idea. Jesse and I spent the next six months making plans of our epic trip to Portland. My dad had offered to give us his Toyota Camry for the trip, I had left my job, and found a couple to sublet my apartment. The plan was in motion and every passing day I was more excited to get out to Oregon.
That is…I was excited until Jesse called me in mid-July to drop the bomb on me. He called to tell me that while he hated to tell me this but he had applied for a job that he was sure that he wasn’t going to get but was surprised when they called and made him an amazing offer and he couldn’t pass it up. I bit my tongue and didn’t lash out at him when I all I wanted to do was scream! What the hell was I going to do? I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have an apartment and I all of a sudden had a car.
I did the only thing I could do in that situation. I called Fred and said “you’re flying out here and driving back across country with me”. Fred was my best friend/partner in crime in college. He was currently living in the bay area with his folks and needed some excitement in his life as well. I knew that convincing him to move to Oregon was next to impossible but I could rally him to take a long road trip with me as long. He was in and we immediately booked a flight for one month later.
We left my parents’ house in Rhode Island without a lot of fanfare. My parents weren’t even there when we actually hit the road, they had plans with friends of theirs that couldn’t be broken. I was in the driver’s seat, Fred was in the passenger and 25 years of importance of crammed into the backseat. We had no schedule and no maps, we were just going to travel across country, see as many friends as we could and sleep on as many couches as we could find. We decided that the first stop on our trip was going to be Buffalo to see some friends of Fred’s I had never met. He convinced me that Buffalo wasn’t as bad as I thought that it was going to be.
We spent four days living on his friend’s couch drinking entirely too much beer and riding bikes to smoke filled dive bars to drink even more beer. I heard that stupid Nelly song for the first time in one of those bars. “Did that man just say ‘cause I feel like busting loose and I feel like touching you, and cant nobody stop the juice so baby tell me what’s the use”? We agreed that hip-hop had peaked with A Tribe Called Quest and we would never be happy again.
After Buffalo, Fred and I decided to drive down to Nashville to see his friend Seth who was going to med school down there. On the way there we stayed a night in Canton Mississippi (city of lights) and couldn’t believe when we walked into the lobby and heard the overnight desk clerk playing “Why you at the bar if you aint poppin the bottles. What good is all the fame if you aint fuckin the models”. Really? Was this song really going to follow us down south as we travelled? Our one rule for the soundtrack for our trip was that we couldn’t listen to the same song twice and here we were with the same awful song for at least the 5th time in as many days.
Our trip continued from Nashville to Memphis where we surrounded ourselves with Elvis songs and spoke with raised lipped snarls. We decided to head towards New Orleans and that’s when the real trouble began. New Orleans has been the home to many people’s woes since it became a drunken destination in 1979. Some people get arrested, some people overdose, some people get alcohol poisoning and some lose their virginity in a cheap hostel to a guy whose name she didn’t know after a heated discussion about Guns n Roses place in the history of American Rock and Roll.
Our troubles were much different than that. That’s where the car died for the first time. The first of many times. Standing on the side of the highway with a smoking car and no cell service (it was 2002 remember), I was just beginning to cry when I saw the bottom half of Fred that I could see sticking out of the hood start shaking. His little butt wiggling left to right. I walked up behind him to see what he was doing and heard him mindless singing in a high pitched voice “I am getting so hot, I’m gonna take my clothes off”. I knew right then that we’d be ok.
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