day one
9 June 2008
(Over the next few days, I’ll be recapping the trip my dad, brother and I took across America. If you’re more into pictures than words, you can pretty much get the idea here. Most of these were written either the day of travel or the next morning, but I needed to clean them up. Also, I’ve just completed my first week out here in LA, so I needed time to get my shit together and ponder the decision I’ve made, which makes me want to punch myself in the face. Hard. Anyway, this is the first in the series.)
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines – the Mulgrew Men Conquer America tour is underway.
To refresh, here’s our deal: My dad, brother and I are driving from Philly to Los Angeles. We are leaving Saturday, May 24, and need to arrive by Friday night, May 30, because my brother’s catching a plane that night back to Philly for a bachelor party. En route, we’re stopping in Nashville (to get drunk) and Sun City, Arizona (to visit relatives). The whole trip is about 2850 miles, which we have seven days to do. Joy.
Our vehicle of choice for this trip is a 1996 black Lincoln Town Car. It is easily the largest car I’ve ever driven and if you’re looking for a new car and want something resembling a Hearse but without the whole carrying-dead-people stigma, then this car would be perfect for you (the cloth top really adds the extra funereal touch). Not only is it a tank that reminds people of death, but the gas mileage for the car is less than ideal, to the tune of 11mpg in the city and 20mpg on the highway; I will spend more on gas alone on this trip than I’ve spent on any vacation I’ve ever taken. Finally, upon moving to and settling into Los Angeles, this will be my everyday vehicle. So in a city where what you drive says everything about you, mine says, “I’m going to kill you and throw you in the trunk – or give you a ride to LAX. Whichever, really.”
(The car does not have a nickname yet, but I imagine it will. The only other car I’ve ever “owned” – a gold 1984 Mercury Lynx that was only slightly larger than my body and seated .8 comfortably and did not have a working speedometer – was nicknamed “Lucy” for reasons that escape me now. However, this was in high school and I did a lot of weird, unexplainable things in high school, for example growing my hair long and trying to gain enough weight to hit 240 pounds in order to win a bet with my dad. Remarkably, I was a virgin in high school. Seriously. I can’t believe it either, but it’s true.)
For a little background, here are some short profiles of the main participants of the MMCA Tour:
Name: Dennis Mulgrew, Sr.
Age: 52
Occupation: Nothing (former mechanic and longshoreman)
Likes: Cigarettes, weapons, peeing
Dislikes: Not smoking
Name: Jason Mulgrew
Age: 28
Occupation: Senior Business Development Analyst
Likes: Comfortable beds, long showers, cleanliness
Dislikes: Wildlife, ruggedness
Name: Dennis Mulgrew, Jr.
Age: 25
Occupation: Future law student
Likes: Napping, fitness, Spanish
Dislikes: Pretty much anything that’s not napping, fitness or Spanish
Now that you’ve been reintroduced to our main participants, let’s back-track a little. Prior to going on this trip, I had two concerns:
1) I was fairly certain that my dad was going to bring a handgun on this trip. I wrote about this before so I won’t go into it in great detail again, but basically he wanted the handgun both for protection and in case he wanted to get out of the car at various points of the trip to shoot things (i.e. cactuses, small rodents, big rocks and shit, etc). It took quite a bit of effort, but my brother and I were able to haggle him down from handgun to pretty big knife (we were stuck on “really big” for two days) and a club. Our basic argument was that if he brought the gun on the trip, how could he get it back? He couldn’t bring it on the plane back to Philly (lie: I think you can pack an unloaded gun in your checked baggage), nor could you walk into FedEx and have it shipped back to you (I think this is a lie, too). So before we even started the engine, we knew we were traveling handgun-less. I love it when people compromise.
2) I was concerned that my dad would stop every forty miles to pee. The last time my dad drove me to NYC (from Philly) about three weeks ago, he peed before we left, peed twice on the drive up, and then was practically kicking down my apartment door to pee once we arrived in NYC. The drive was completely free of traffic and took about two hours, so he went to the bathroom four times in roughly two and half hours, for an average of one piss every 37.5 minutes of travel. This is not a good average when you’re expecting to spend twelve hours a day in the car for the next six days. However, he is still my dad, and while I’ve been subtly suggesting some sort of funnel and Gatorade bottle apparatus, if the man wants to stop to pee every forty miles, we’ve got to stop the car every forty miles. This obstacle we’ll have to deal with as it comes.
Day 1: Saturday, May 24 Philadelphia, PA – Abingdon, VA
Original Departure Time: 10:00am
Adjusted Departure Time: 11:00am
Actual Departure Time: 1:08pm
Total Distance Traveled: 499 miles
The egregiously late start time was my fault (mostly). I got in to Philly very late the previous night after working until 8pm on the Friday night of Memorial Day weekend, which was great, and then throwing out nearly everything in my apartment and leaving the rest in my hallway with a sign that says “Free – Moved Out of Country.” I caught the last train out of Philly and got in just before 1am. Knowing it would be my last one for some time, I got a cheesesteak, which had such a sedative effect on me that it might as well have been a giant, gooey Ambein. I set my alarm for 9am, but was awoken by my brother at 10:27am when he walked into my bedroom and asked, “Dude, are you ready?” Whoops. After loading up the car and saying goodbye to everyone, we hit the road just after 1pm. Better late than never.
Since we wanted to stop in Nashville, our goal for the first day was to do at least 500 miles. This would put us within striking distance of Nashville on the following day (Nashville is 800 miles from Philly), with the goal of getting into the city sometime in the late afternoon to relax, have dinner and get shit-canned. The drive from Philly to Boston, which each of my dad, brother and I have done numerous times, is a little more than 300 miles. So 500 miles was an ambitious goal for the first day, but not unreasonable.
The first day of traveling, like the first round of a boxing match, is all about feeling each other out. Despite having the same DNA, my dad, brother and I are three pretty different people who haven’t hung out much together. Sure, I stay with my dad when I’m in Philly and I see my brother when I’m back home, but it’s one thing to make small talk and hang out for a few hours and another entirely to live every waking moment with these people in the confines of a smoke-filled Hearse. Would we talk? (A little, sure) Would we argue? (Probably not) Would we pretty much sit in silence? (Bingo)
As we passed quickly through Pennsylvania and Delaware and made quick work of Maryland, music was the discussion topic of choice between my dad and I, as my brother fell asleep 38 minutes into the drive. Prior to the trip, I had spent weeks crafting iPod playlists to listen to while driving with themes like Rock, Indie, Country, Rap, Oldies and Dirt Rock (comprised of songs by Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Eagles of Death Metal, Black Sabbath, White Stripes and the Black Keys, to name a few, and subtitled “This playlist will make you HARD!”). Of course, in the mess of the move and in the rush to get both out of NYC and then out of Philly, I forgot to get an iPod adapter for the car’s cassette player. So we listened to local radio stations. All day long.
My agent Joel, who’s done the cross-country drive three times, warned me that I would hear a ton of AC/DC, Lynard Skynard and Jars of Clay on the drive, but on this day, as we barely ventured out of the mid-Atlantic region, the music was eclectic and for the most part, bearable. As we listened, I learned many things about my dad’s taste in music, which I had previously assumed consisted only of Bad Company and Foreigner and anything you would hear in a mechanic’s shop or on comes free with those calendars of bikini-clad ladies laying over motorcycles. It actually wasn’t so much what was said but what songs were reacted to. For example, when Warrant’s “Heaven” came on the radio, my dad was moved enough to say “Oohh”, give a bit of fist-pump, and sing along (“Hey Now” by Tears for Fears elicited a similar response). When telling me that “Another Brick in the Wall” was his senior prom theme (St. John Neumann, Class of ’73), “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis came on the radio, and I had to spend the better part of an hour assuring him that it was not a Mott the Hoople song (he still doesn’t believe me and probably never will).
A few hours later as we entered Virginia, my brother, now awake, pointed out that the state has some of the highest traffic fines in the country and urged us to drive slowly. We dismissed this as him being overly cautious; my dad, who took the first shift, sped most of the way through his leg, a trend I continued in my shift, the third one, while my brother in the middle of us topped out at maybe 66 miles per hour in his second shift. We’re in a Lincoln Town Car, we’re a family, and we’re driving cross-country – it would be un-American to follow the speed limit. Fucking Commie brother.
Our first real stop, and thus our first taste of America outside of the Northeast, was at a gas station in rural, central Virginia. I bought what I lived off the first time I did a long-distance drive (from Seattle to LA): diet coke and combos. The woman at the cash register was probably the world’s shortest non-midget whose nametag actually read “Little Bitty.” I paid Little Bitty for my foodstuffs, wondered what her house looked like and what she looked like when she had an orgasm, and walked back to the car, where my brother was pumping gas. My dad followed shortly behind me out of the store flush with excitement. He was nearly delirious when he pulled out what he had purchased: another “pretty big” knife.
Yes, Virginia, in this state you can buy some pretty serious knives at gas stations and, though clearly in violation of the Mulgrew Weapon Treaty of 2008, my dad went and bought one for himself, a nice little vacation souvenir. Like many dads, my dad is obsessed with knives and other weapons (wait, what?). This is a man who carries a gun with him to poop and, say what you want about guns, but at least they’re going to get the job done. I don’t put much faith in knives, even though they’re shiny and cool, since a knife can be dropped, a knife can be taken away, and a knife can be plunged into oneself running away from a real threat (i.e. murderer) or a perceived threat (i.e. something that sounds like a bear but is really a raccoon or perhaps just wind). Nonetheless, the knife had been purchased and there was no way Little Biddy was going to give us a refund, so under the passenger seat it went with the first knife and the club, which is actually some sort of device used for hitting/checking tires.
We drove onward and enjoyed the hills of Virginia, my dad happily behind the wheel. We switched drivers every time we stopped to piss or for food, which was about every two hours or 120 miles. Because we had three drivers, for every two hours of driving, there was four hours of sitting. As a result, once you actually had the chance to drive, you were thrilled and wanted to open up the Beast of the Town Car on the open road and see what you could do. Now through a rotation and having sat for four hours, my dad was driving, doing 80 in and over the hills, seeing what the Town Car, loaded to the brim and weighing roughly 16,000 pounds, was capable of.
As we came down a hill, car on fire, my dad motioned to a brushy area and said, “That’s where they usually hide.” No sooner had he said those words than a state trooper, lights blaring, shot out from the brush and got behind us. I looked at the speedometer and saw 78. 78 in a 70mph zone was not too bad.
Sitting idly on the shoulder of the road, the statie, who was no more than 24, walked up along the passenger side, asked how we were doing, and asked my dad why he thought he was pulled over. “Because I was going a little fast” was his answer, to which the trooper replied a deep Southern “Yes, sir” and asked for license and registration. After reviewing the documents, the trooper explained that we had clocked us at 82mph in a 65mph zone (I was mistaken), and that anything over 80mph in the state of Virginia is considered reckless driving. Not only that, our windshield, according to the statie, was illegal. See, the top of the windshield of the Hearse/Town Car is tinted (naturally). On the windshield glass, there is a little line, one all the way on the left and one all the way on the right, 85% of the way up the windshield, that says something like “A1A.” Any window tinting below this line, like we have in the Town Car, is illegal in Virginia. Because that’s a law that really makes sense. Fucking Commie Virginia lawmakers.
This is when the pleading started. It wasn’t so much as pleading as playing dumb, which wasn’t so much playing dumb as telling the truth. My dad said that he had no idea about that law and had just bought the car, that we were a family driving across the country to move me to California, that we were coming down a hill and the car must have ticked up a few miles faster. The trooper said he understand and said he’d be back in a minute.
As we sat there, we assumed that we were going to get away with a warning. After all, it’s not like we were doing 95mph or the car smelled like pot or we were black. While not the all-American family, my dad has not been in jail for over 20 years, I have not taken any illegal drugs in over three weeks, and my brother is a future lawyer. This trooper seemed nice and reasonable and we’d be back on the road in no time. Totally.
We were back on the road in no time, but not without two tickets – one for the speeding and one for the tinting – and a summons for my dad to appear in court in Pulaski County, Virginia sometime this July at 8:30am. The statie, despite his Southern manner and kind, albeit a little crooked eyes, had dropped the fucking hammer on us. We were stunned and before we could say anything, the trooper wished us a nice evening and walked back to his car.
My dad and I sat in the front, unmoving, me stunned, him angry. My brother, ever quick, pulled out his phone and googled “reckless driving Virginia” and in less than thirty seconds informed us that reckless driving is a Class 1 misdemeanor – the same classification as a DUI/DWI charge – in Virginia, with penalties up to one year in jail and/or up to $2,500 in fines. We sat for a moment longer, my dad looking at the summons in his right hand. The summons still in hand, he turned on the ignition, shifted the car from “P” into “D”, pulled slowly back onto the highway, and said “Fuck it – I’ll never set foot in Virginia again”, crumpling up the summons and throwing it in the backseat.
Good plan, but it has only one slight problem. The future law school of my brother Dennis? The University of Virginia. Oh well. Those graduation ceremonies are always overrated anyway.
************
Shortly after, we pulled into Marion, Virginia and ate at an Italian restaurant there. I was up next to drive, but was so moved by how cheap the beer was – $6 pitchers (!), and a line about their cheap happy hour special, which I surmised must include paying people to drink their beer, since it doesn’t get much cheaper than $6 pitchers on a Saturday night outside of West Africa – that I had to have some beers. My dad, who doesn’t drink, said he’d continue driving on, so after dinner we did another 30 miles or so and settled into a murder hotel in Abingdon, VA. Exhausted, and possibly $2,500 poorer, we called it a night. Day One of the MMCA Tour, done.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines – the Mulgrew Men Conquer America tour is underway.
To refresh, here’s our deal: My dad, brother and I are driving from Philly to Los Angeles. We are leaving Saturday, May 24, and need to arrive by Friday night, May 30, because my brother’s catching a plane that night back to Philly for a bachelor party. En route, we’re stopping in Nashville (to get drunk) and Sun City, Arizona (to visit relatives). The whole trip is about 2850 miles, which we have seven days to do. Joy.
Our vehicle of choice for this trip is a 1996 black Lincoln Town Car. It is easily the largest car I’ve ever driven and if you’re looking for a new car and want something resembling a Hearse but without the whole carrying-dead-people stigma, then this car would be perfect for you (the cloth top really adds the extra funereal touch). Not only is it a tank that reminds people of death, but the gas mileage for the car is less than ideal, to the tune of 11mpg in the city and 20mpg on the highway; I will spend more on gas alone on this trip than I’ve spent on any vacation I’ve ever taken. Finally, upon moving to and settling into Los Angeles, this will be my everyday vehicle. So in a city where what you drive says everything about you, mine says, “I’m going to kill you and throw you in the trunk – or give you a ride to LAX. Whichever, really.”
(The car does not have a nickname yet, but I imagine it will. The only other car I’ve ever “owned” – a gold 1984 Mercury Lynx that was only slightly larger than my body and seated .8 comfortably and did not have a working speedometer – was nicknamed “Lucy” for reasons that escape me now. However, this was in high school and I did a lot of weird, unexplainable things in high school, for example growing my hair long and trying to gain enough weight to hit 240 pounds in order to win a bet with my dad. Remarkably, I was a virgin in high school. Seriously. I can’t believe it either, but it’s true.)
For a little background, here are some short profiles of the main participants of the MMCA Tour:
Name: Dennis Mulgrew, Sr.
Age: 52
Occupation: Nothing (former mechanic and longshoreman)
Likes: Cigarettes, weapons, peeing
Dislikes: Not smoking
Name: Jason Mulgrew
Age: 28
Occupation: Senior Business Development Analyst
Likes: Comfortable beds, long showers, cleanliness
Dislikes: Wildlife, ruggedness
Name: Dennis Mulgrew, Jr.
Age: 25
Occupation: Future law student
Likes: Napping, fitness, Spanish
Dislikes: Pretty much anything that’s not napping, fitness or Spanish
Now that you’ve been reintroduced to our main participants, let’s back-track a little. Prior to going on this trip, I had two concerns:
1) I was fairly certain that my dad was going to bring a handgun on this trip. I wrote about this before so I won’t go into it in great detail again, but basically he wanted the handgun both for protection and in case he wanted to get out of the car at various points of the trip to shoot things (i.e. cactuses, small rodents, big rocks and shit, etc). It took quite a bit of effort, but my brother and I were able to haggle him down from handgun to pretty big knife (we were stuck on “really big” for two days) and a club. Our basic argument was that if he brought the gun on the trip, how could he get it back? He couldn’t bring it on the plane back to Philly (lie: I think you can pack an unloaded gun in your checked baggage), nor could you walk into FedEx and have it shipped back to you (I think this is a lie, too). So before we even started the engine, we knew we were traveling handgun-less. I love it when people compromise.
2) I was concerned that my dad would stop every forty miles to pee. The last time my dad drove me to NYC (from Philly) about three weeks ago, he peed before we left, peed twice on the drive up, and then was practically kicking down my apartment door to pee once we arrived in NYC. The drive was completely free of traffic and took about two hours, so he went to the bathroom four times in roughly two and half hours, for an average of one piss every 37.5 minutes of travel. This is not a good average when you’re expecting to spend twelve hours a day in the car for the next six days. However, he is still my dad, and while I’ve been subtly suggesting some sort of funnel and Gatorade bottle apparatus, if the man wants to stop to pee every forty miles, we’ve got to stop the car every forty miles. This obstacle we’ll have to deal with as it comes.
Day 1: Saturday, May 24 Philadelphia, PA – Abingdon, VA
Original Departure Time: 10:00am
Adjusted Departure Time: 11:00am
Actual Departure Time: 1:08pm
Total Distance Traveled: 499 miles
The egregiously late start time was my fault (mostly). I got in to Philly very late the previous night after working until 8pm on the Friday night of Memorial Day weekend, which was great, and then throwing out nearly everything in my apartment and leaving the rest in my hallway with a sign that says “Free – Moved Out of Country.” I caught the last train out of Philly and got in just before 1am. Knowing it would be my last one for some time, I got a cheesesteak, which had such a sedative effect on me that it might as well have been a giant, gooey Ambein. I set my alarm for 9am, but was awoken by my brother at 10:27am when he walked into my bedroom and asked, “Dude, are you ready?” Whoops. After loading up the car and saying goodbye to everyone, we hit the road just after 1pm. Better late than never.
Since we wanted to stop in Nashville, our goal for the first day was to do at least 500 miles. This would put us within striking distance of Nashville on the following day (Nashville is 800 miles from Philly), with the goal of getting into the city sometime in the late afternoon to relax, have dinner and get shit-canned. The drive from Philly to Boston, which each of my dad, brother and I have done numerous times, is a little more than 300 miles. So 500 miles was an ambitious goal for the first day, but not unreasonable.
The first day of traveling, like the first round of a boxing match, is all about feeling each other out. Despite having the same DNA, my dad, brother and I are three pretty different people who haven’t hung out much together. Sure, I stay with my dad when I’m in Philly and I see my brother when I’m back home, but it’s one thing to make small talk and hang out for a few hours and another entirely to live every waking moment with these people in the confines of a smoke-filled Hearse. Would we talk? (A little, sure) Would we argue? (Probably not) Would we pretty much sit in silence? (Bingo)
As we passed quickly through Pennsylvania and Delaware and made quick work of Maryland, music was the discussion topic of choice between my dad and I, as my brother fell asleep 38 minutes into the drive. Prior to the trip, I had spent weeks crafting iPod playlists to listen to while driving with themes like Rock, Indie, Country, Rap, Oldies and Dirt Rock (comprised of songs by Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Eagles of Death Metal, Black Sabbath, White Stripes and the Black Keys, to name a few, and subtitled “This playlist will make you HARD!”). Of course, in the mess of the move and in the rush to get both out of NYC and then out of Philly, I forgot to get an iPod adapter for the car’s cassette player. So we listened to local radio stations. All day long.
My agent Joel, who’s done the cross-country drive three times, warned me that I would hear a ton of AC/DC, Lynard Skynard and Jars of Clay on the drive, but on this day, as we barely ventured out of the mid-Atlantic region, the music was eclectic and for the most part, bearable. As we listened, I learned many things about my dad’s taste in music, which I had previously assumed consisted only of Bad Company and Foreigner and anything you would hear in a mechanic’s shop or on comes free with those calendars of bikini-clad ladies laying over motorcycles. It actually wasn’t so much what was said but what songs were reacted to. For example, when Warrant’s “Heaven” came on the radio, my dad was moved enough to say “Oohh”, give a bit of fist-pump, and sing along (“Hey Now” by Tears for Fears elicited a similar response). When telling me that “Another Brick in the Wall” was his senior prom theme (St. John Neumann, Class of ’73), “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis came on the radio, and I had to spend the better part of an hour assuring him that it was not a Mott the Hoople song (he still doesn’t believe me and probably never will).
A few hours later as we entered Virginia, my brother, now awake, pointed out that the state has some of the highest traffic fines in the country and urged us to drive slowly. We dismissed this as him being overly cautious; my dad, who took the first shift, sped most of the way through his leg, a trend I continued in my shift, the third one, while my brother in the middle of us topped out at maybe 66 miles per hour in his second shift. We’re in a Lincoln Town Car, we’re a family, and we’re driving cross-country – it would be un-American to follow the speed limit. Fucking Commie brother.
Our first real stop, and thus our first taste of America outside of the Northeast, was at a gas station in rural, central Virginia. I bought what I lived off the first time I did a long-distance drive (from Seattle to LA): diet coke and combos. The woman at the cash register was probably the world’s shortest non-midget whose nametag actually read “Little Bitty.” I paid Little Bitty for my foodstuffs, wondered what her house looked like and what she looked like when she had an orgasm, and walked back to the car, where my brother was pumping gas. My dad followed shortly behind me out of the store flush with excitement. He was nearly delirious when he pulled out what he had purchased: another “pretty big” knife.
Yes, Virginia, in this state you can buy some pretty serious knives at gas stations and, though clearly in violation of the Mulgrew Weapon Treaty of 2008, my dad went and bought one for himself, a nice little vacation souvenir. Like many dads, my dad is obsessed with knives and other weapons (wait, what?). This is a man who carries a gun with him to poop and, say what you want about guns, but at least they’re going to get the job done. I don’t put much faith in knives, even though they’re shiny and cool, since a knife can be dropped, a knife can be taken away, and a knife can be plunged into oneself running away from a real threat (i.e. murderer) or a perceived threat (i.e. something that sounds like a bear but is really a raccoon or perhaps just wind). Nonetheless, the knife had been purchased and there was no way Little Biddy was going to give us a refund, so under the passenger seat it went with the first knife and the club, which is actually some sort of device used for hitting/checking tires.
We drove onward and enjoyed the hills of Virginia, my dad happily behind the wheel. We switched drivers every time we stopped to piss or for food, which was about every two hours or 120 miles. Because we had three drivers, for every two hours of driving, there was four hours of sitting. As a result, once you actually had the chance to drive, you were thrilled and wanted to open up the Beast of the Town Car on the open road and see what you could do. Now through a rotation and having sat for four hours, my dad was driving, doing 80 in and over the hills, seeing what the Town Car, loaded to the brim and weighing roughly 16,000 pounds, was capable of.
As we came down a hill, car on fire, my dad motioned to a brushy area and said, “That’s where they usually hide.” No sooner had he said those words than a state trooper, lights blaring, shot out from the brush and got behind us. I looked at the speedometer and saw 78. 78 in a 70mph zone was not too bad.
Sitting idly on the shoulder of the road, the statie, who was no more than 24, walked up along the passenger side, asked how we were doing, and asked my dad why he thought he was pulled over. “Because I was going a little fast” was his answer, to which the trooper replied a deep Southern “Yes, sir” and asked for license and registration. After reviewing the documents, the trooper explained that we had clocked us at 82mph in a 65mph zone (I was mistaken), and that anything over 80mph in the state of Virginia is considered reckless driving. Not only that, our windshield, according to the statie, was illegal. See, the top of the windshield of the Hearse/Town Car is tinted (naturally). On the windshield glass, there is a little line, one all the way on the left and one all the way on the right, 85% of the way up the windshield, that says something like “A1A.” Any window tinting below this line, like we have in the Town Car, is illegal in Virginia. Because that’s a law that really makes sense. Fucking Commie Virginia lawmakers.
This is when the pleading started. It wasn’t so much as pleading as playing dumb, which wasn’t so much playing dumb as telling the truth. My dad said that he had no idea about that law and had just bought the car, that we were a family driving across the country to move me to California, that we were coming down a hill and the car must have ticked up a few miles faster. The trooper said he understand and said he’d be back in a minute.
As we sat there, we assumed that we were going to get away with a warning. After all, it’s not like we were doing 95mph or the car smelled like pot or we were black. While not the all-American family, my dad has not been in jail for over 20 years, I have not taken any illegal drugs in over three weeks, and my brother is a future lawyer. This trooper seemed nice and reasonable and we’d be back on the road in no time. Totally.
We were back on the road in no time, but not without two tickets – one for the speeding and one for the tinting – and a summons for my dad to appear in court in Pulaski County, Virginia sometime this July at 8:30am. The statie, despite his Southern manner and kind, albeit a little crooked eyes, had dropped the fucking hammer on us. We were stunned and before we could say anything, the trooper wished us a nice evening and walked back to his car.
My dad and I sat in the front, unmoving, me stunned, him angry. My brother, ever quick, pulled out his phone and googled “reckless driving Virginia” and in less than thirty seconds informed us that reckless driving is a Class 1 misdemeanor – the same classification as a DUI/DWI charge – in Virginia, with penalties up to one year in jail and/or up to $2,500 in fines. We sat for a moment longer, my dad looking at the summons in his right hand. The summons still in hand, he turned on the ignition, shifted the car from “P” into “D”, pulled slowly back onto the highway, and said “Fuck it – I’ll never set foot in Virginia again”, crumpling up the summons and throwing it in the backseat.
Good plan, but it has only one slight problem. The future law school of my brother Dennis? The University of Virginia. Oh well. Those graduation ceremonies are always overrated anyway.
************
Shortly after, we pulled into Marion, Virginia and ate at an Italian restaurant there. I was up next to drive, but was so moved by how cheap the beer was – $6 pitchers (!), and a line about their cheap happy hour special, which I surmised must include paying people to drink their beer, since it doesn’t get much cheaper than $6 pitchers on a Saturday night outside of West Africa – that I had to have some beers. My dad, who doesn’t drink, said he’d continue driving on, so after dinner we did another 30 miles or so and settled into a murder hotel in Abingdon, VA. Exhausted, and possibly $2,500 poorer, we called it a night. Day One of the MMCA Tour, done.
