Headlights Optional

I was all beat up and driving a car with no headlights through the rain. The radio was broken but I was still singing some song I remembered from some damned place, probably a bar, probably a mistake, probably a woman who deserved better than the situation she found herself in, which put her in good company with most of the decisions I’ve made since 1987, no…birth. You can’t kill me because I don’t have enough sense to die, which is not the epitaph I planned but it’s the one I’ve earned and at this point I’ve stopped arguing.

I was pointed toward Georgia, which is where a man from Georgia points himself when California has finished with him, and California will always finish with you eventually. It just takes longer because the sun is warm and the people are attractive and by the time you realize what’s happened to you, you’re too far in and you’ve started talking about your feelings to anyone that will listen. I had been there on some foolishness or another, which is my stock in trade, and the details are not the kind that improve with retelling.

The wipers were doing their best, which wasn’t much, and that put them in good company with everything else I was working with that night. The heater ran on one setting, which was too hot, and the defroster worked on no settings, which meant I was navigating by feel and optimism and the occasional lightning strike that lit up the road long enough to confirm I was still on it. A smarter man would have pulled over. A smarter man would have a lot of things I don’t have, including dry socks, a savings account, and a second act that made more sense than the first one. I am not that man and have never been in serious danger of becoming him.

The rain came down like it had a grievance and the time to pursue it. It hit the roof like it was trying to make a point, hit the windshield like it had already made the point and wanted to make it again, hit the road ahead and turned everything past the hood into something between a suggestion and a rumor. I leaned forward over the wheel the way you do when doing something is going to help exactly nothing but you do it anyway because it’s all you’ve got and a man in motion needs to look like he means it even when meaning it is the only thing he has this side of desperation.

I have been broke. I have been lost in four states and two countries, most of which I probably shouldn’t have been in to begin with, and I know that because there was still Mexican dust in the floorboards from a trip I’d spent a couple of years pretending wasn’t a mistake. I have been wrong about women, wrong about money, wrong about which roads go through and which ones just stop suddenly and leave you there with your bad choices. I have started things I didn’t finish and finished things I never should have started and stood at the graves of people I loved and felt the loneliness of a man who knows the world kept turning when it damn well should have stopped for a moment out of basic respect. I have been all of those things and I was all of those things that night in that rain in that car with no headlights and a broken radio and one working wiper and I was still singing.

You don’t survive things because you’re strong. You survive them because somewhere down in the bottom of you there is something that doesn’t know how to quit and doesn’t care what the conditions are and has never once surveyed for opinions before deciding to continue. Stubbornness maybe. Stupidity probably. And stupidity is the last intact thing in a man after everything reasonable has been exhausted for fuel. I don’t know what it is. I only know it was there that night, singing a song it only half remembered in a car that had no business being on the road, and it, nor I, was afraid.

The lightning came again and the road was there. Wet and pale and going somewhere it hadn’t revealed to me yet. Another road that doesn’t make promises. Just the kind that lets you glimpse the next hundred feet and says that’s all you get, and a man who has been around long enough knows that a hundred feet is a gift and not a guarantee and you take it every single time without complaint.

I took it.

I have always taken it.

A smarter man would have pulled over and waited for better conditions, and a smarter man is welcome to his dry seat and his good sense and his perfect little life. I have no quarrel with him. But I have never once looked back at the rain I drove through and wished I had stopped. I have looked back and laughed. I have looked back and shaken my head because stupidity and glory are the same thing and the only difference is whether you lived, and I lived, and even now I’m still not entirely sure which one it was.

Glory, I believe, is just stupidity that survived long enough to get its story straight. Or perhaps the difference is the quality of the man telling the story.

Bows.

I never did find the ending to that song. Still haven’t. I’m still driving. And I am still singing the part I know and making up the rest, which is all any of us are doing out here in the dark anyway, headlights or not.