Drive
- Jun 17, 2022
- 4 min read
by Tara Stillions Whitehead
The last day I see you alive, you eat dim sum for breakfast and show me your Galaxie — press my pale thighs against its Phoenician yellow and Navajo white, kiss me like you used to kiss your wife before she was your wife and leave me wondering if you taste like Djarum Blacks when you apologize to her on Mondays.
The last day I see you alive, you smell like morning surf and patchouli, an entire summer of want. We split a piece of Big Red and drive to Tanglehood where you fix the pickup on Bill’s guitar, break his E string while playing “Rivers of Babylon,” apologize to the cat, clear the bong chamber, draw tiny infinities on my ankle with a Sharpie, and cry about the letter you got from Joe.
You’re done chasing prostitutes in GTA by noon and need to go Downtown, so you invite Bill, let him ride shotgun because he doesn’t talk much and has a pompadour. You pick up AJ, pick up Danny, pick up Shawntá. You cruise Tamarack while we finger the chrome ashtrays and lie cool against the polished leather doors. You pop a CD adapter into the cassette deck and play the mix Kim made for you, skip “40 oz. to Freedom” to “Disarm,” park across from Spin Records, next the gazebo. You shepherd us through the parking lot, sing about how we can’t all stay here forever in that Shannon Hoon register I’d never heard before.
Everyone goes to the bar while we get stoned with Nikki in the Village bathroom. You whisper about Joe and the war. You spin me out of the stall, across the walkway to Vinaka, claim the last iron patio chair on the over-deck. You light a clove, send moon-shaped smoke signals into the café umbrella. You eat biscotti, laugh at the tourists, visit the payphone by the souvenir shop downstairs, and come back a little taller, brighter, a little less saturnine.
The last day I see you alive, you ask me about film school, ask if I’ve met George Lucas yet, tell me you’ve been putting your portfolio together. You ask what it’s like to challenge the legacy of old white men whose names gold-plate the university sound stages I’ve been losing myself in.
You tell me I need to put the Galaxie in a movie.
“Producers drop hella cash for picture cars,” I say. “It’s easy. All you do is drive.”
I’m smart, not beautiful, and I’ve never had a man tell me he wants to run away with me without telling me he wants to run away with me before. I’m still so young.
You stop asking questions about film school. You get up, go down to the payphone, come back with two cups of black coffee. I want to take a picture of the steam rising to meet your freckled lips, the way your entire body curses the sun. But I’ve left my camera on a closet shelf in my L.A. bedroom, convinced this place from my past is a secret I can visit and escape as I please.
Before you go to work, you swap your clove for charcoal, draw Rob’s portrait on a napkin, tell Emily about the letter her brother sent, pull your accoutrements — pristine, white, creaseless — out of your camo Jansport backpack. You walk around the corner singing “Hunger Strike,” spend two hours slicing fish into hand rolls, nigiri, endless boards of sashimi. You bless it with your special sauce, drink the sake women your mother’s age buy you.
At four o’clock, you put your knives away, change back into Catholic black, return to find me and Nikki rolling cigarettes. You take us to Peabody’s, buy the bar a round of your Irish beer, play Eightball, stack coasters, do a speed bump with some Pendleton jarheads, leave, use the payphone, come back, shove bills into the jukebox, play Jenn’s favorite songs, lick Anita’s tits behind the air hockey table, pose for Kim’s Nikon, sweep your curls and flex your dragon. You find the shadows, watch me watching you watch Bob watching me, orbiting like a moon, feeding me two shots of Goldschläger, grabbing my arm. You know what Bob did to Janae — we all know — so you breeze over, put your inked-up fingers in the back pocket of my cutoffs, give me the keys to the Galaxie.
We float down serpentine streets to the lagoon, to a man-sized hole in the chain link. You make yourself weightless above my body, the spectral chamise, say you’re running away with me in the morning, say you don’t want to be twenty-two forever.
In a few weeks, during peak fire season, I’ll regret the ecstasy of coming while thinking about going, slipping away from you, the chaparral, the summer, into the last-week memory of sleeping with my New Wave Film Studies TA in the music stacks of Doheny Library.
I’m passing Dana Point on the 5 North by seven, half drunk, half shaking, one hundred percent alive and moving away, into the brightening every next second of my life, the holy ghost of you inside of me.
The last time I see you and your Galaxie, it’s on a screen that’s not showing one of my movies.
You’ve stopped leaving Monty Python recordings on my voicemail, stopped texting about Joe’s letters, about the baby and the divorce, the sun’s unbearable ennui, and whether I could put in a good word about your Roski Art School application.
I’m about to leave my bungalow a mile north of the university on 27th and Hoover, bracing myself for the 5’s gridlock, thinking about white leather and chrome, anticipating the sound of rain on the hard top, the eventual relief in your face. I’m walking through the garden gate towards the alley when Shawntá calls me and says, “Go back inside,” says, “turn on the TV,” says, “you see that fire?” says, “that’s all that’s left of him and the Galaxie.”
Tara Stillions Whitehead is a writer and filmmaker from Southern California living in Central Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in a variety of places, such as Hobart, Fairy Tale Review, and The Rupture, and was included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 2021. She is the author of three hybrid story collections: Blood Histories (Galileo Press, 2021), The Year of the Monster (Unsolicited Press 2022), and They More Than Burned (ELJ Editions, 2023).
