Upstate Simulacrum Blues, ch. 1

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Written in Iowa City, 1993

A different Kingston story, first of six chapters.

Traffic on the FDR was thick as plasma, the Triborough Bridge could hardly suck it out as fast as Manhattan island could produce it. Jack and Ramona and four million others thought they could beat the Friday rush by leaving town early.

It was to be a homecoming of sorts, Ramona’s idea. Jack’s folks had left Kingston five years before and it’d been that long since he’d seen his hometown. Ramona was from Long Island and Jack had been out there plenty of times but she’d never been north of Westchester, never seen where Jack was from.

Jack was a little edgy about the whole thing. He knew something was up the minute she’d told him she had gotten them a room in a bed and breakfast: Kingston had always been a Holiday Inn kind of town.

Forty minutes into the trip they had barely reached the Bronx. Ramona, driving, was starting to get a tension headache. “Would you mind if we put Stacey in?” she asked.

“I don’t mind,” Jack said. “I just wish you’d stop calling her Stacey.”

“What am I supposed to call her, that’s her name.”

“Yeah, but the way you say it, Stacey, it’s like you know her personally or something, it’s very cultish.”

“Jack, I’m about to go crazy.”

“Okay, okay, where is it?”

“It’s in my bag.”

Jack dug out the tape and stuffed it into the car’s cassette player. “Meditation with Stacey” it was called, Ramona had bought it at the Open Center. It opened up with a little jingly jangly music from the Far East, then Stacey came on and said some word that might have been Tibetan or Indian or Japanese, it sounded to Jack like “Cut a salami.” He disliked the woman’s self-satisfied voice and had an uneasy feeling that if Ramona were ever to actually meet Stacey in person the two of them would go off somewhere and become lovers.

“Head suspended,” Stacey said, “as if a string attached to the center of your head was pulling you to heaven.”

Ramona sat up straight in her seat, and Jack, reminded of his own poor posture, straightened his back as well and gave his neck a little twist until he felt it crack.

“Take a deep breath,” Stacey said.

Jack could hear the whistling sound Ramona made as she slowly drew a long breath in through her nose.

“Now breathe out.”

Again, Ramona followed Stacey’s instruction. “You should try this sometime, Jack,” she said after exhaling, “it’s very soothing.”

“When we get to where there’s air, I’ll breathe.”

By Yankee Stadium they were going a steady 35 miles an hour. This was when Stacey said, “Now, won’t you join me in the sound of om?” and as her om began to swell from the tinny speakers of the rental car, Ramona too produced her own drawn-out, resonant tone. Jack looked over and saw Ramona smiling slightly with her eyes fully closed.

“Ramona,” he said.

No reaction.

“Ramona!” Jack reached up and punched the eject button, the staticky blare of an untuned radio came blasting out in the om’s place.

“Jack, what’d you do that for?!”

“You had your eyes closed, for Christ’s sake.”

“They were not fully closed.”

Ramona reached frustratedly for the radio, fumbling with the knobs until she figured out how to turn off the static.

“I’d rather not die before we get there,” Jack said.

“I love when we start out like this,” she said, “it really sets the tone for a pleasant weekend.”

Jack crossed his arms and looked out the window. They drove on in silence. Traffic began thinning out as the Bronx gave way to Yonkers which gave way to Upstate, the country.

After the better part of an hour Ramona pulled over at a rest stop.

“What are you doing?” Jack asked.

“I’m getting a drink.”

“We’re more than half-way there.”

“I’m thirsty, I have to go to the bathroom.”

The building looked vaguely like an Adirondack lodge, she pulled right up to the front door and threw it in park.

“Two-hour straight shot, that’s the way we always do it, rest stops are for trips that are three hours or longer.”

“Would you like anything?” she said, turning the car off.

“You know that I don’t believe in these places.”

Ramona sat back in her seat, closed her eyes.

“No, Jack, I didn’t know that you didn’t believe in rest stops.” She did know that once Jack began to theorize, life could not proceed until he had finished making his point, she figured she’d get it over with.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in rest stops, it’s this Burger King bullshit, what’s Burger King doing on the Thruway?”

“People get hungry, Jack.”

“When I was little, they had Hot Shoppes on the Thruway.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Hot Shoppes were an entity unto themselves, that’s how you knew you were on the Thruway and not on some other road, that’s how you knew you were on a trip.”

Ramona was staring at Jack as if to say Are you for real? but Jack wasn’t getting the hint.

“I used to love Hot Shoppes,” he continued, “just inside the door of the men’s room they had a big vending machine with combs and aspirin and little puzzles. I would always bug my dad until he got me one of those little puzzles, or those black-and-white dogs with the magnets in them…and they had nothing but big toilets…I would stand there at a big toilet, just like my dad.”

Ramona, softening, said, “My dad took me into the men’s room once when we were on a trip. There was a little boy in there, I saw his little penis.”

“Was that you?”

“Was what me?”

“The little girl who stared at my penis that one time?”

“The boy had blonde hair.”

“I had blonde hair, blondish hair—what state were you in?”

“How should I know?”

“If you were on the Thruway you were in a Hot Shoppe, if you were on the Mass Pike you were in—“

“I was in a state of shock, Jack, I’d just seen my first penis!” she said laughing, hoping Jack would laugh too, which he sort of did when he said, “How do you think I felt, I was violated, I was the victim.”

They sat there sort of in love for a moment, then Ramona opened the door. “Look,” she said, getting out of the car, “are you coming in or not?”

Jack looked up at the Burger King sign like it was continuing to pose an existential question.

“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe if it was a McDonald’s…I guess they got me early on, in my formative years. But you know something? I had a Big Mac about two months ago and I swear to you, I think they changed the special sauce, there’s something funny about it.”

He waited for her response as if she’d actually agree with him about the special sauce. She shook her head in disbelief. He’d had the opportunity to redeem himself and blown it.

“You need to mellow out, Jack,” she said, slamming the door, then, as if to drive the point home, she reached back in through the open window and clicked “Meditation with Stacey” into place again so that the om continued where it had left off.

[Click here to continue to Chapter 2]

Note: “Simulacrum” is a fancy word for a copy that gets confused with reality, the title will make sense by chapter 4…