A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing. – Thomas Wolfe
Somewhere south of Monterrey, Merry Miler is rolling along Highway 1. Like it’s on rails.
We’d spent the night parked between a couple of Japanese cars in an upper-middle class neighborhood, halfway up the hill between the Presidio’s Defense Language Institute and the Aquarium. In the morning we drove by the barracks I’d lived in when I studied Czechoslovakian for the National Security Agency nearly three decades earlier.
Which is about the same number of words I remember in that language. But, I don’t mention that to Hiawatha. Instead, I say, sure, I’m a polyglot; a speaker of many foreign tongues. Like Spanish, sure.
Quando caliente el sol? Quien hora es, senor? Una cerveza, por favor? No tengo dinero, senorita. Vaya con dios, amigos y amigas.
Somewhere south of Leguna Seca. “I have to be honest about that one,” I tell Hiawatha. “I’d just be guessing if I told you I knew what it meant.”
We drove past more signs with a distinct Spanish flavor. I’m translating the names of various places like Las Putas Mall (“Las putas? I think that means ‘low prices’) and Vista Verde Estates. Directly translated, I told her that meant “green sight.” I expounded: “I think it’s idiomatic, meaning ‘jealousy,’ as in ‘You’ll be green with envy when you get a look at these places.”
CABALLERO CYN. That was one sign I could not translate. “Horse,” of course. But Cyn? I was saying the word like it was pronounced “Sin.”
“I’ll have to take a guess,” I told Hiawatha. “Caballero Cyn. It means, HORSE PUCKY. Turn off at this exit and you’re in Horse Pucky, California.” That’s where she began to get wise, like maybe I didn’t really hable espanol as bueno as I’d been telling her I did.
Then we came to a sign that said TOPANGA CYN. I caught a clue. CYN is the abbreviation for “canyon.” I finally figured it out: it’s not Spanish after all!
Caramba.
In the past, the only times I’ve been lost, this is a lie, is when I couldn’t find a street or an address. I am so lost now I can’t find the town. All these places have grown together like cancerous cells until they’ve become this meltdown of a metropolis called LaLaLand.
“Why don’t you ask those boys for directions,” Hiawatha suggests, pointing to a crowd of young black men dressed like professional athletes representing such groups as the Raiders, the Pirates, the Kings, the Bullies and N.W.A. Niggers With Attitude. Mostly wearing camouflage combat fatigues and Malcolm X caps. Not a Redskin or a Timberwolf among them.
I can see the automatic weapons from where I sit in the van. Really.
“They appear to be coordinating their next armed robbery.” I keep driving.
“What is it with men?,” Hiawatha wants to know. “Why can’t you dudes lower yourself just a moment for reality’s sake and ask somebody where you are?”
“I have a theory about that.”
“I thought you might.”
Back in the old days, before we existed, there were these hairy guys and their hairy babes who went through life barefoot and downwind. Trying to eat and not get eaten.
They stayed on the move. If they were lucky, they had a wild dog.
So the man and the woman and the dog would travel. Because they were not afraid and because they were strangers to this place, the man would stick his head into the first cave that came along.
Often as now the cave would belong to a sabertooth tiger or a groin-sucking skullasaurus or some bigger hairier guy, and the guy who asked for directions was never seen again.
He was lost forever.
I am lost temporarily.