Herewith we have another blog related to a book I plan to write (I think) about my experience with starting a new life at the age of 40, and the lessons I could impart to others. I touched on the subject in a pair of recent blogs (here and here). In one of those blogs, I sketched out an introduction to the book, then indicated that I would no longer share any more book excerpts.
Well, so much for that….
As mentioned in previous blogs, I consulted AI to get a sense of how to structure such a book. It was only later that I asked the most important question: How long should the book be?
Here’s what it said:
For a prescriptive memoir (a blend of personal narrative and actionable advice), the sweet spot for commercial viability typically falls between 60,000 and 80,000 words…this equates to approximately 220 to 300 pages.
That’s when I started panicking – because 60,000-80,000 words is just a whole GD lot of words. I don’t think I have 60,000-80,000 words to write on this subject, at least in the arena of life advice. I can barely give advice on what to wear on a rainy day, let alone what to do with the rest of your days.
As luck would have it, one of the people who knows me best (hint: I’m married to her) said maybe I should include more anecdotal passages, personal sketches. It was brilliant advice, because hell, I can do that in my sleep.
The problem is, I have a hard time writing such stuff if it’s just me and the keyboard. I’ve never been great at writing just for myself. I need some kind of audience, at least a few readers. So I sat and sat and sat and wrote nothing.
But then I figured, what the hell – just write them and publish them in your blog. So that’s what I’m doing here.
This particular passage has to do with a major life event from my late 20s. The rest should be self-explanatory.
*****
I pulled into Amarillo, Texas, in the middle of the night, probably 2 a.m. or so. The world outside was mostly pitch black, interrupted only by the neon hue of roadside gas stations and hotels. My brain was equally pitch black, or at least the part that was still functioning.
I had just hauled 720-odd miles in a single drive. Thirteen-plus hours, accounting for stops. It was a long drive, but not necessarily a difficult one. I mostly stayed on one piece of asphalt: Interstate 40, which stretches across the entire continent, from North Carolina in the east to California in the west. Exactly 2,559 miles (4,120 km) from one end to the other, according to our friends at Google.
In less than 48 hours I had traveled roughly 1,370 of those miles – more than half the total distance.
I was deadass tired and craved nothing more than a good night’s sleep in a cheap motel. I had never been to Amarillo before (or Texas, for that matter) – had never, in fact, been this far west in a car. But it looked like as good a place as any to call it a night. I spotted a Motel 6 by the highway, with its promises of a $19 room, and wandered into the lobby, cash in hand.
Fifteen minutes later I was in bed and out cold, far away from home, and light years away from a life that seemed etched in stone not too long ago. My subconscious probably churned out many vivid dreams that night in Amarillo. But I’m not at all sure what those dreams had to tell me.
*****
The journey to Amarillo began in my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, two days earlier. On the first day, I drove about 650 miles to Memphis, Tennessee, straight west. That drive took about 10.5 hours, which means I was hauling it pretty good in my old Renault Alliance (I think those were the Alliance days).
It was November of 1987, just past my 29th birthday. I was in one of these periodic life phases when I felt unmoored, directionless, unmotivated, and itching for a change of scenery – any change of scenery. This was a semi-regular occurrence as a young adult, as I hopped from job to job, town to town, apartment to apartment, relationship to relationship.
At the time, I was working a couple of jobs that sucked up more than 70 hours a week between them. Neither paid particularly well, and neither put me on anything resembling a successful career track.
My main job involved an office management/accounting role for a company that owned three miserably failing Western Sizzlin’ steakhouses. My primary duties were to keep the books, oversee income and expenses, take care of payroll, handle accounts receivable and accounts payable, and produce monthly income statements and balance sheets.
I had no prior professional experience with any of these things. But no matter. The owner hired me on the recommendation of a friend who worked for a company that was itching to sell the owner a new computer accounting system.
When they pitched the owner, he told them something along the lines of, “Well hell, I don’t have anybody to even run a computer accounting system.”
“Not to worry,” my friend told him. “I know a guy who’s a college grad, is between jobs, and can handle the work.”
That guy was me. My friend knew I was in dire need of a job, any job.
I was hired at a salary of $18,500 a year, or the equivalent of about $52,000 in today’s dollars. For that salary, I had to work six days a week – Monday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. Fifty-four hours a week.
Those hours were not random. The office I worked at was located in the back of one of the steakhouses. The owner wanted to ensure that I was on the job before the lunch service as well as a good part of the dinner service. Although my official job title was “Office Manager,” I spent a whole bunch of hours setting up the buffet, cutting meat, and helping out in the kitchen.
This restaurant, like many, paid its kitchen staff lousy wages and offered minimal perks and benefits. Turnover was high. Morale was low. When employees suddenly quit, or didn’t show up at all, I’d have to trade my Office Manager hat for a Foodservice Worker hat.
On the bright side, we were not overflowing with business. Customers were few, so I didn’t have to deal with many insane mealtime rushes. A couple years later the whole operation went bankrupt.
My other job, a part-time one, was as a bartender at a comedy club called The Punch Line. I worked a couple nights a week, and enjoyed it. It was a fun place, with fun employees. After putting in all those hours with the steakhouse company, making drinks at a comedy club seemed more like play than work.
But at the end of the day, I was still working my ass off at a couple of jobs that were heading nowhere fast, for companies that wouldn’t survive the next half-decade.
*****
Here’s the thing about my brief tenure as an office manager/accountant/restaurant worker/bartender:
I had never, ever, imagined that’s what I would be doing as a living.
I was trained as a journalist, a newspaper reporter. That’s where my main skill set lay, and where my professional interests were focused for as long as I could remember.
I had been writing for different papers since I was barely in my teens. I wrote for our junior high newspapers. In high school I belonged to a career club that allowed me to work with professional reporters. I studied journalism in college, wrote for the university paper, graduated in 1982, and immediately went to work for a small-town daily in Greenwood, South Carolina.
But then, life happened. Rather, boy-girl stuff happened.
I had a girlfriend back in Charlotte. So naturally, being a young and clueless dude, I left a decent job behind to be closer to her. She had a job that eventually required her to relocate to Birmingham, Alabama. So naturally, being a young and clueless dude, I made the move with her. About six months later, she and I were finis.
After the breakup I crawled back to Charlotte, moved back in with my mother, and bounced around a series of temp jobs for a year or so.
In August of 1985, I hooked on with a small-town weekly newspaper in Denver, North Carolina. By December of 1985, that paper had gone under.
In February of 1986, I hooked on with another small-town weekly in Boone, North Carolina. By August of 1986, that paper and I had separated ways.
In September of 1986, back in Charlotte, I hooked on with the steakhouse company. By November of 1987 I was completely burned out on that job – brain-fried, soul-frazzled, desperate to do anything else in the world, anywhere else in the world.
Often I would sit in the empty restaurant, eating the same old lunch at the same old table, and stare out the window beyond the parking lot and to the far horizon beyond, due west. I imagined what lay beyond the horizon. I developed mental images of what people were doing in Oklahoma, Arizona, California.
I pictured being somewhere out there – anywhere out there – and told myself that someday, one day…..
Well, that day would eventually come. First in a single short burst. And later as a permanent chapter in my life.
For now, however, in November of 1987, I just knew I needed a change of scenery. Without a change of scenery, Christ knows what might have happened. My desperation was primal, my desire for a change bottomless.
I had no real plan in place, other than to just disappear for a while. So I put the wheels in motion.
I turned in my notice at the steakhouse job and trained a replacement (for what seemed like decades, but was really only a few weeks). I requested an extended period of time off from the bartender job, and they were gracious enough to grant it.
I explained things to my roommate, an old friend who could not have been more understanding.
I packed a couple of bags, gassed up the car, and hit the freeways. I had about a thousand bucks saved up, and little idea of what I would do with the rest of my life, or even the next few weeks.
*****
My immediate plans were to drive to New Orleans and kick around there for a while. I’d always wanted to visit the Big Easy, but had never gotten around to it.
From what I’d read about New Orleans, I knew it was one of those rare U.S. cities with a distinctly non-U.S. vibe. From a cultural and architectural standpoint, it more closely resembled Europe or the Caribbean than the USA. It was the birthplace of jazz, rich in history and mystery, with a spicy, delicious cuisine you won’t find anywhere else in the world.
Mostly, New Orleans had a reputation for a place that could let you forget that you were in America for a while. That sounded like the perfect tonic to my life in Charlotte, which back then was one of the most generic American cities you can imagine.
In those pre-GPS days, you navigated long-distance car trips by using paper maps. New Orleans is about 700 miles (1,120 km) from Charlotte if you take the straightest path. But that would involve spending part of your time on smaller state highways, with their endless stoplights and shifting speed limits. The backroads held a certain charm, no doubt about it. But I wasn’t interested in charm. I just wanted to haul ass on those big old interstate freeways.
So, I decided to drive west to Memphis on Interstate 40 (650 miles), and then cut directly south to New Orleans on Interstate 55 (another 400 miles). Memphis and New Orleans are both Mississippi River cities, so it’s a pretty straight shot. I’d be driving a much longer distance – about 1,050 miles vs. 700. But the freedom of the interstate beckoned me, with its promises of high speeds, open windows, and music blasting from the cassette player.
Well, Memphis was fun. But also expensive. I blew through about $150 in a single night – roughly 20% of my entire budget. Most of the money went toward a pricey center city hotel room I couldn’t really afford but also couldn’t resist. The rest went toward a night on the town I also couldn’t really afford. (And yes, $150 was a pretty big piece of change to spend in a single night in 1987, the equivalent of $425 today).
Financially, it was an unwise move on my part. But not atypical, at that time in my life. I was frugal and thrifty in most things. But when I was threatened with a good time and a luxe experience, the old financial willpower could dissolve pretty quickly.
In any case, I took care of the Memphis part of the journey.
But the New Orleans part?
Well……
I can’t recall exactly when I decided to keep pushing west rather than head south toward New Orleans. But my guess is that it happened on the spur of the moment, not long after I checked out of the Memphis hotel and hit the road again. I got back on I-40, saw the highway stretching west, and decided, screw it – just keep driving.
And drive I did. Onward and westward.
And I drove.
And I drove.
And I drove.
*****
There’s a certain sensation that engulfs you when you put enough miles in on a car, and enough distance between you and the place you left behind. It happens around the time you decide that there’s no point in turning back, so you might as well hit the gas a little harder and keep pressing forward.
It’s hard to describe, this sensation. It’s like you’re no longer weighted down by the gravitational pull of home. You’re just somewhere out there in the vast orbit, anchorless, defying the laws of physics. You don’t know exactly where you’re headed, but you know that you’re free to go there.
It’s an electric feeling – literally electric. You can physically feel the currents pulsing through your mind and body. The farther you drive, the more liberated you feel. In time, you see your former self fading into the rear-view mirror, until you can’t even see it at all.
I’m not sure if I was overcome with that sensation on the long drive from Charlotte to Memphis and then into Amarillo. Much of it was spent barreling through Southeastern U.S. terrain I was intimately familiar with. It was the same old world I grew up in.
By the time I reached Amarillo, in the Texas panhandle, it was dark outside and I was drained of all energy. All I wanted to do was check into a motel and doze off.
But when I woke up later that morning ….
…..and stepped outside into a whole new world I had never seen before. I was in the middle of a vast prairie, with skies as big and blue as all eternity. The horizon seemed to stretch forever. There were none of the trees or hills or meadows I had grown up with. It was like I’d stepped into an alien world, or at least a Hollywood studio, on the set of an old Western movie.
Nothing in Amarillo reminded me of home. And to this day, that remains one of the most searing memories in my consciousness.
My next stretch of I-40 would take me through the mesas of New Mexico, and then into the deserts of Arizona and California.
It was during this stretch that I really felt the sensation of a new beginning, the one I described earlier. I became overwhelmed with a feeling that life would never be the same again.
It would take many more years for that shift to develop permanent roots in my life.
But somewhere, deep down, I knew it was coming.
Image: AI generated, based on my instructions to create what I-40 might have looked like heading west in 1987, in a Renault Alliance, with music blasting out of the cassette player.
Vance Cariaga 