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Interstate 95, white lines, tarmac, Atlantic City, Library of Congress, judges, warrants, Savannah, Southern states, motorcycles & a girl.
After speaking with my attorney, I headed south for a few days. That was all I had before turning myself in.
My life until then unfurled like tarmac stretching across the Eastern Seaboard, white lines extending north and south between New York and Miami on Interstate 95. At times, while motoring through the Southern states, the path is narrow, straight and long. There are miles of construction cones and work crews. In metropolises, the path dips and curves with the contours of industrial parks. In the past five years I’ve often found myself filled with doubt, traveling one direction or the other, trying desperately to make sense of my own life narrative.
I have not made much forward progress. But there are arteries, along the interstate, that reach far-flung places where I have come to stop a time or two and squirreled away a morsel of wisdom that helped me later. Places like Manhattan, Princeton, Atlantic City, Philadelphia, Charleston, Atlanta, Savannah, Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Miami and Key West. This could be a Greyhound or Amtrak itinerary. I’ve taken those trips too.
THERE HAD BEEN A FATAL ACCIDENT. I SURVIVED. SOMEONE ELSE DID NOT.
To be honest, this all began with a girl—a childish, teenaged want that I mistook for love.
Let’s call her Meredith. I had not graduated high school, but she had. And instead of finishing sophomore year, I studied for a high school diploma equivalency while attending classes at a community college. I was seventeen.
When she left for college in South Carolina, I began ruminating on my own life plans: what was next, what could come and if I had any future at all. Did I even want one? Recently released from juvenile detention, a monitoring bracelet around my ankle, it seemed to me that living out my days quietly with an associate’s degree and a job delivering pizzas and sandwiches was just fine.
But I became curious and found myself seeking out schools within driving distance of her campus. It wasn’t long until I found one that seemed worth trying. The bracelet was removed after my eighteenth birthday, marking the end of a period I do not enjoy talking about other than to say I was youthful, ignorant and arrogant and had made a mistake. When I received my acceptance letter from the little art school in Savannah, Georgia, I felt like my life was on track.
Things immediately didn’t work out with Meredith. She found another guy and dated several more. I had driven to Miami to wait for school to begin. It was summer when I arrived, with a heat so thick it crawled under my skin. I bought a motorcycle to pass the time and cool off. I spent hours piloting the screaming bike across stretches of the interstate and blue highways that crisscrossed it. I had never seen the white lines blur together at speed.
This was different. At triple-digit speeds, I focused my attention farther ahead, the lines mere suggestions as I dipped between trucks and cars. Once, entering an on-ramp, I leaned the bike as far as I could and rode momentarily underneath the carriage of a tractor-trailer. Afterward, I pulled off the road and caught my breath. I had to cool down. I felt death pass through my body. Then I caught a glimpse of the South Beach skyline—a dimpled array of purple and blue lights sheathed in art deco, a cruise ship turning about in the port—and once more, slowly, steadily, pulled back into traffic.
When I finally made it to Savannah, doe-eyed and ecstatic, school about to begin, I walked along the tabby-covered streets, bits of shells jutting out at my sandals. Passing the colonial houses and red-door townhomes on Jones Street, the obelisk in Forsyth Park, I wondered if there was any place more beautiful than this.
Years later, I found myself traveling parallel to the interstate on a Philadelphia-bound Acela. Between New York and Philly there exists a wasteland, remnants of a nineteenth-century rustbelt, the spent casings of a lost revolution. Factories in various stages of decay. Brick walls crumbled or collapsed. Industrious and keen observers can see promise in such a relegated place. Towns can be rebuilt. Nothing, even ruin, is forever.
I was a young explorer trying to make the world not seem as devastatingly vast and incomprehensible as it was. I wanted to break the unmanageable parts of my life into smaller, compartmentalized bits.
The roads remained a sacred place. I drove between Savannah and Miami, Savannah and New York, spinning off to various towns along the way. They began to seem the same: sad faces hunched over bars, dead-eyed gas station attendants, various girls. Each woman, I thought, was the one that got away. I read Kerouac once while hitchhiking through Nevada and Southern California, but he was a child born for the West, a ravaged youth seeking truth and meaning. This was something entirely different. I was a young explorer trying to make the world not seem as devastatingly vast and incomprehensible as it was. I wanted to break the unmanageable parts of my life into smaller, compartmentalized bits.
I would come to forget Meredith, my time in juvenile hall and the lonesome riding I did in Florida. I finally left Savannah in a state of duress. There had been a fatal accident. I survived. Someone else did not.
When my lawyer called about the indictment on Thursday, I knew I would need to leave for Savannah once again. This time I was in New York, hunkered down in a small room in Queens with the walls covered in books and newspapers, a place I finally and effortlessly called my own.
I headed down to New Jersey to see my mother. She was caring and sweet and wanted to discuss my case, the accident, but I said I could not. News reports said myself and another man were in a car accident that claimed the life of another. We were intoxicated, and each said the other was driving. I know my truth. From years of storytelling, I’ve learned that between two people a story can vary widely. Neither is wrong. Everyone brings their own subjectivity, their own precautions. I told my mother this and that it was too difficult to discuss, too big to manage, wrapped in legal uncertainty. Then I left for Atlantic City to clear my mind.
I was up on my luck at the tables at first, then I lost everything. At the blackjack table, I checked on a sixteen, leading the woman next to me to bust. I pushed against the dealer and took what little money I had with me outside into the cold. It was winter and flurrying snow. A pushcart operator walked over and asked for a smoke. As he approached I thought to myself about silence and not wanting to speak with anyone, needing some time alone, but what we plan to say in our heads isn’t always what we say.
“After four rides, you be feeling that shit,” he said, lighted his smoke and walked off.
“That’s tough luck,” I said, and lit my own. For what it’s worth, I meant what I said.
After gassing up the car again in Princeton, with little money to my name, I pulled into a parking spot near a coin-operated vacuum and stood outside. Under a thin sheet of ice was a five-dollar bill from Monopoly. The fun I sought that weekend was in vain. The fear was visceral. What would become of this accident? What is guilt and innocence? Could I ever know the truth about that night? I decided then I could not be on the lam. There was no truth in running. I had my fun. It was time to head south.
When a warrant was issued the following Tuesday I drove south, this time in the far-right lane, slow moving and steady. I still had time before they expected me at the jailhouse, though, and pulled off briefly in Washington, D.C. I always enjoyed the capital, its confluence of Southern nonchalance and colonial wherewithal. The capitol building’s dome was being rehabilitated; the scaffolding stood against the purple sky. To the right, as I motored down Pennsylvania Avenue through Maryland and into downtown, the Washington Monument stood proud.
The last time I was there I went to the Library of Congress. There was no real reason for my visit other than curiosity. But the tours seemed boorish and all the visitors crowded the beauty. I found a desk in the basement and asked a woman there if I could get a reader’s card—granting me access into the main studies. She gave me one. The card meant everything to me. It was a secret win. I slipped it into my pocket and have not removed it since. I felt for the card in my back pocket as I pulled up to my girlfriend’s house in Lincoln Park. It was another small trinket to prove that I had been somewhere.
Later, I pulled onto the interstate and continued on my way. On the road, I wondered about my case. Would the charges brought against me stick? They were heavy, two felonies, one of which was violent. They call incomprehensible things accidents because it softens the understanding. It’s easier to accept something as vague than it is to face the truth. I asked myself endless questions. What were the likely outcomes? Was there hope? Was there even a point? I briefly thought about fleeing or committing suicide, then never again.
It was three in the morning on Wednesday when I pulled into the hotel parking lot in Savannah. A few hours later, I would turn myself in and begin the arduous process of bail bonds, arraignments, court dates and jail time. Not knowing the final outcome was the worst part. Not having resolution is frustrating. But first, I had to rest.
When I woke in the morning, I drove to my lawyer’s office, passing under Spanish moss near the Forsyth Park obelisk. When I walked through the front door, I went into his office to find him behind a long wooden desk, treated with a dark finish. Mounds of red files and paperwork covered it. He leaned back in his chair. I extended my hand, bringing him momentarily forward and out of a deep, comfortable recline.
It had been more than a year since the accident. Now all I had was five days.
The lawyer said the judge would hold a bond hearing on Tuesday of the coming week. He advised I turn myself in on Monday. It had been more than a year since the accident. Now all I had was five days. I immediately returned the keys to the hotel clerk at the front desk.
“Looks like rain,” the clerk said, drawing out her vowels. I thought back to the time I spent with the anklet, the beacon that shackled me to New Jersey and a solitary life. I remembered my time in juvenile detention and how I spent hours one day staring through the thin sliver of window in my cell. It was lined on the inside with chicken wire that obscured the view. But I could see raindrops collecting against the window, slithering downward and out of sight, much like tears.
I wanted to step outside of the hotel at that moment and stand beside my car. For all the world, I wanted to feel the pelting sensation of rain, if only one last time. Instead, I drove down the interstate against wuthering sheets of it. It was dark and the roads were slick. It was not the best idea to drive seven hours to Miami—for me a place of tireless intervention and separation—with an active bench warrant. But I could not sit in a hotel room withering away with my thoughts. I turned to the road for refuge, the coast and its connected towns seemingly smaller and closer than ever. While the miles ticked down to zero, my case mired in uncertainty, I needed to find resilience. I needed it then more than ever and sought it between the cracks and divots of a patchwork life spent navigating the interstate alone.
Kenneth Rosen works and writes for The New York Times.