Soulmate?
Wednesday, 12. April 2006, 06:01:06
It's about time I told a particularly poignant (to me anyway) story about Robert. This was first published as a series of four blog entries during the July 2003 Blogathon. It's all here in one post for you guys.
I thought this would be a good time to blog about my significant other, Robert. We’ve been together since 1980. That’s a long time. And, okay, so now you know how old we both are. (He’s got ten years on me, though!) This is a long story and I’ll tell it in several installments. Just so you keep reading, m’kay?!
He decided in May 1986 that he wanted to go back to Alice, Texas by himself for awhile. The reason? “To find myself,” he said. I had to let him. What else could I do? Well, I heard from him about a week later. He’d driven, in his rickety, tomato red Dodge Tradesman 2000 van, to Las Vegas. He called me from the Stardust, collect, around seven o’clock one workday morning. I was relieved he was okay and it made sense to me then why I hadn’t heard from him at all until that time.
Another week or so went by and by that time, we’d had several telephone conversations. It was during one of them that he then told me I needed to send the title to his van to him c/o General Delivery, Las Vegas, Nevada. He needed some cash, the van had broken down (the fact that it made it that far, to me, was a miracle) and he was going to sell it for whatever he could get. I promised to send the title to him the next day, and did. Turns out he was at least able to get several hundred dollars for the hulking piece of junk. So he still had his head above water. Had he found himself? He didn’t say and I never asked.
A few more weeks went by, with Robert still in Las Vegas, still updating me with telephone calls several nights each week. He was now living in a motel with a couple of guys he’d met on the Strip. They were chipping in for the room; food or drink wasn’t an issue back then; the buffets were cheap and the drinks flowed as long as you were sitting at a gaming table.
But it wasn’t long until his luck ran out. He called me on a Sunday evening in early July and expressed a desire to return home and asked me to wire him $100 to tide him over. I agreed to wire him the money and he promised to call me the next evening. Well, Monday evening came and went and I got no telephone call. I called the Stardust a few times and had him paged, to no avail. More disturbing than that, however, was the fact that the $100 I’d wired to him remained unclaimed. He’d never gone to pick it up.
By the time Tuesday evening rolled around, with no word from Robert and the money still sitting, unclaimed, at the Western Union office in Las Vegas, I ratcheted my worry up a notch or two.
More calls to the Stardust, pages unanswered, phone silent. Did he try to come home without the money? Had he tried to hitch-hike? Was he laying dead by the side of the road somewhere between here (San Antonio, Texas) and there, his pockets turned inside out? Where was he? And WHY hadn’t he surfaced?
I mentally reviewed our last conversation. He sounded calm and rational. Didn’t appear to be overly worried or upset about anything. Of course, Robert never is. That’s just his nature. So there were really no clues there. Our last conversation was that I would wire him the $100 and I was to look into prices of a one-way plane ticket back home to San Antonio. I knew Robert was a “tough old bird” and it wouldn’t be beneath or beyond him to hop a bus or a train or thumb his way home if he thought he could.
I had some vacation time coming to me so I talked to my boss and decided to take the rest of the week, plus the following week, off. I got out my atlas and studied the map. I figured I’d drive out to Las Vegas and try to find him. I decided I’d stay a day or two at the most and if I didn’t have any luck, I would return home. What I’d do after that remained to be seen.
My boss, a naturally timid and cautious woman, was worried about me driving to Las Vegas in my 1983 Ford Escort that I’d just purchased and learned how to drive (it was a stick-shift) only a few weeks before. I told her that it was 1986 and that I was going to Las Vegas in a fairly new car, on an interstate highway — not through Donner Pass in a covered wagon. She still didn’t like the idea. And made me promise I would fly out there rather than drive. Sure, okay, right, whatever.
So the next day, I took my car in for an oil change and cursory inspection, ended up repacking the wheel bearings and getting four new tires. I did a couple of loads of wash to be sure I had clean clothes for the trip, ran a few errands and returned home to pack and rest up.
Bright and early the next morning, I packed some sandwiches and snacks, a large Thermos of coffee, a plastic gallon jug of drinking water, several changes of clothes for the both of us (ever the optimist) and a selection of cassette tapes for the long drive.
I carefully reviewed the route I would take and left a note for Robert to this effect. I also indicated that I would be calling the house every six hours or so in the event that he made it home, so I could head back at the earliest opportunity. I had gone to the bank the day before and gotten plenty of cash for the trip so I left a twenty dollar bill, along with the note, on the kitchen table where he’d be sure to find it. I boarded my cat at the vet and headed west. It was ten o’clock in the morning on a Friday. I had exactly ten days to get to Vegas, locate Robert and get back home in time for work the following Monday. A piece of cake.
The route I chose to get from San Antonio to Las Vegas was a fairly scenic one. I decided to blast right down Interstate 10 until I got to New Mexico. In Las Cruces, I’d take I-25 up to Albuquerque and catch I-40 (the old Route 66) across New Mexico, Arizona and into Nevada where I’d take I-93 about a 100 miles north straight into Lost Wages. I made pretty good time I thought. Even stopping in Van Horn around 3:00 p.m. (to call the Stardust as I’d promised I would) and considering there was a time zone change in El Paso, I made it there in seven hours — it was about 6:00 p.m. Mountain time (5:00 p.m. San Antonio time) when I glanced “The Armpit of Texas” in my rear view mirror. (Apologies to El Pasoans, but really….)
I drove a little further past a town called Anthony, New Mexico, which is literally on the border between Texas and New Mexico and which also boasts a prison. A Texas Prison (go figure!). By seven p.m. I was getting hungry. I decided to stop in Las Cruces to have a bite to eat and stretch a bit. I had a nice, leisurely meal, piddled around with my food for about 30 minutes and was back on the road by 7:45 p.m. I headed north on I-25 toward Albuquerque. For all my careful planning and charting and list-making and packing, I’d forgotten one thing. The clock in my car didn’t work. It never had. And it probably never would. But did I bring a watch? Nope. I had been relying on the radio to tell me what time it was. But here in desolate New Mexico, the choices were Navajo radio and Navajo radio. And my tapes. So I decided to put in my favorite Survivor album, Vital Signs, and boogie on down the road.
It seemed like hours and hours had passed. I’d listened to that tape over and over I don’t know how many times. It was dark, and had been for a few hours. I was getting tired, but I remembered my promise to call the Stardust. Part of me wanted to press on to Albuquerque and just call from my motel room. But a little voice inside my head kept insisting, You said you were going to call so you NEED TO CALL!. I spotted a motel sign up ahead and swung off the Interstate. I figured it was pretty close to nine p.m. by that time. And that was when I was supposed to make my phone call. I finally navigated the cloverleaf exit and pulled into the parking lot of the motel. There was a bare light bulb hanging in the lobby and a biker-looking dude behind the desk reading a magazine. I pointed toward the lone pay phone on the dingy wall and he nodded, bored, and returned to his magazine.
I glanced at the wall clock above the phone. Yikes. It was already 10:35!! I was way off. But I was already here. Might as well call. I decided to call my house first. Of course, there was no answer. Then I called the Stardust to have Robert paged. The operator put me on hold for what seemed like an eternity. I was just about to hang up when….
I’d been just about to hang up when I heard Robert’s voice on the other end of the phone. “Where are you?” he asked me. “Socorro, New Mexico,” I said. “Good, you’re on your way!” He told me what had happened to him. That Sunday night, with nowhere to go, he crashed behind a church in an abandoned cardboard box. The police came around and picked him up and booked him for Vagrancy. He had just gotten out of jail that very evening and had been walking through the lobby of the Stardust Hotel on his way to his rented locker when he heard his name being paged.
Think about that. If I’d been on time, as planned, I’d have missed him. I took just enough time farting around on the cloverleaf and finding that little dump of a motel. If that isn’t fate, then I don’t know what is!
Happy to have touched base with him, I literally floated out of the lobby back into the car and onto the freeway. I made it to Albuquerque at midnight and stopped off in the first motel I saw on Interstate 40. I had directions to where Robert was staying and I would be there the next day. I slept like a log, dreamless, that night. The motel was decent. It wasn’t so bad that you wanted to levitate across the room in your sock feet. The air conditioning was freezing cold, the drapes were thick, letting no desert sun in, and blocking out all the street lights and sounds.
I woke up and got going around eight a.m. the next morning. Breakfast was provided in the form of strong hot coffee and an assortment of donuts and muffins. I gorged on blueberry muffins and coffee. I stood outside my car looking at the day ahead of me. The air was clear, clean and thin. The sun was shining. I thought to myself at that moment that there wasn’t anything on earth prettier than a New Mexico morning. And coming from me, decidedly NOT a morning person, that was a very high compliment.
I thought this would be a good time to blog about my significant other, Robert. We’ve been together since 1980. That’s a long time. And, okay, so now you know how old we both are. (He’s got ten years on me, though!) This is a long story and I’ll tell it in several installments. Just so you keep reading, m’kay?!
He decided in May 1986 that he wanted to go back to Alice, Texas by himself for awhile. The reason? “To find myself,” he said. I had to let him. What else could I do? Well, I heard from him about a week later. He’d driven, in his rickety, tomato red Dodge Tradesman 2000 van, to Las Vegas. He called me from the Stardust, collect, around seven o’clock one workday morning. I was relieved he was okay and it made sense to me then why I hadn’t heard from him at all until that time.
Another week or so went by and by that time, we’d had several telephone conversations. It was during one of them that he then told me I needed to send the title to his van to him c/o General Delivery, Las Vegas, Nevada. He needed some cash, the van had broken down (the fact that it made it that far, to me, was a miracle) and he was going to sell it for whatever he could get. I promised to send the title to him the next day, and did. Turns out he was at least able to get several hundred dollars for the hulking piece of junk. So he still had his head above water. Had he found himself? He didn’t say and I never asked.
A few more weeks went by, with Robert still in Las Vegas, still updating me with telephone calls several nights each week. He was now living in a motel with a couple of guys he’d met on the Strip. They were chipping in for the room; food or drink wasn’t an issue back then; the buffets were cheap and the drinks flowed as long as you were sitting at a gaming table.
But it wasn’t long until his luck ran out. He called me on a Sunday evening in early July and expressed a desire to return home and asked me to wire him $100 to tide him over. I agreed to wire him the money and he promised to call me the next evening. Well, Monday evening came and went and I got no telephone call. I called the Stardust a few times and had him paged, to no avail. More disturbing than that, however, was the fact that the $100 I’d wired to him remained unclaimed. He’d never gone to pick it up.
By the time Tuesday evening rolled around, with no word from Robert and the money still sitting, unclaimed, at the Western Union office in Las Vegas, I ratcheted my worry up a notch or two.
More calls to the Stardust, pages unanswered, phone silent. Did he try to come home without the money? Had he tried to hitch-hike? Was he laying dead by the side of the road somewhere between here (San Antonio, Texas) and there, his pockets turned inside out? Where was he? And WHY hadn’t he surfaced?
I mentally reviewed our last conversation. He sounded calm and rational. Didn’t appear to be overly worried or upset about anything. Of course, Robert never is. That’s just his nature. So there were really no clues there. Our last conversation was that I would wire him the $100 and I was to look into prices of a one-way plane ticket back home to San Antonio. I knew Robert was a “tough old bird” and it wouldn’t be beneath or beyond him to hop a bus or a train or thumb his way home if he thought he could.
I had some vacation time coming to me so I talked to my boss and decided to take the rest of the week, plus the following week, off. I got out my atlas and studied the map. I figured I’d drive out to Las Vegas and try to find him. I decided I’d stay a day or two at the most and if I didn’t have any luck, I would return home. What I’d do after that remained to be seen.
My boss, a naturally timid and cautious woman, was worried about me driving to Las Vegas in my 1983 Ford Escort that I’d just purchased and learned how to drive (it was a stick-shift) only a few weeks before. I told her that it was 1986 and that I was going to Las Vegas in a fairly new car, on an interstate highway — not through Donner Pass in a covered wagon. She still didn’t like the idea. And made me promise I would fly out there rather than drive. Sure, okay, right, whatever.
So the next day, I took my car in for an oil change and cursory inspection, ended up repacking the wheel bearings and getting four new tires. I did a couple of loads of wash to be sure I had clean clothes for the trip, ran a few errands and returned home to pack and rest up.
Bright and early the next morning, I packed some sandwiches and snacks, a large Thermos of coffee, a plastic gallon jug of drinking water, several changes of clothes for the both of us (ever the optimist) and a selection of cassette tapes for the long drive.
I carefully reviewed the route I would take and left a note for Robert to this effect. I also indicated that I would be calling the house every six hours or so in the event that he made it home, so I could head back at the earliest opportunity. I had gone to the bank the day before and gotten plenty of cash for the trip so I left a twenty dollar bill, along with the note, on the kitchen table where he’d be sure to find it. I boarded my cat at the vet and headed west. It was ten o’clock in the morning on a Friday. I had exactly ten days to get to Vegas, locate Robert and get back home in time for work the following Monday. A piece of cake.
The route I chose to get from San Antonio to Las Vegas was a fairly scenic one. I decided to blast right down Interstate 10 until I got to New Mexico. In Las Cruces, I’d take I-25 up to Albuquerque and catch I-40 (the old Route 66) across New Mexico, Arizona and into Nevada where I’d take I-93 about a 100 miles north straight into Lost Wages. I made pretty good time I thought. Even stopping in Van Horn around 3:00 p.m. (to call the Stardust as I’d promised I would) and considering there was a time zone change in El Paso, I made it there in seven hours — it was about 6:00 p.m. Mountain time (5:00 p.m. San Antonio time) when I glanced “The Armpit of Texas” in my rear view mirror. (Apologies to El Pasoans, but really….)
I drove a little further past a town called Anthony, New Mexico, which is literally on the border between Texas and New Mexico and which also boasts a prison. A Texas Prison (go figure!). By seven p.m. I was getting hungry. I decided to stop in Las Cruces to have a bite to eat and stretch a bit. I had a nice, leisurely meal, piddled around with my food for about 30 minutes and was back on the road by 7:45 p.m. I headed north on I-25 toward Albuquerque. For all my careful planning and charting and list-making and packing, I’d forgotten one thing. The clock in my car didn’t work. It never had. And it probably never would. But did I bring a watch? Nope. I had been relying on the radio to tell me what time it was. But here in desolate New Mexico, the choices were Navajo radio and Navajo radio. And my tapes. So I decided to put in my favorite Survivor album, Vital Signs, and boogie on down the road.
It seemed like hours and hours had passed. I’d listened to that tape over and over I don’t know how many times. It was dark, and had been for a few hours. I was getting tired, but I remembered my promise to call the Stardust. Part of me wanted to press on to Albuquerque and just call from my motel room. But a little voice inside my head kept insisting, You said you were going to call so you NEED TO CALL!. I spotted a motel sign up ahead and swung off the Interstate. I figured it was pretty close to nine p.m. by that time. And that was when I was supposed to make my phone call. I finally navigated the cloverleaf exit and pulled into the parking lot of the motel. There was a bare light bulb hanging in the lobby and a biker-looking dude behind the desk reading a magazine. I pointed toward the lone pay phone on the dingy wall and he nodded, bored, and returned to his magazine.
I glanced at the wall clock above the phone. Yikes. It was already 10:35!! I was way off. But I was already here. Might as well call. I decided to call my house first. Of course, there was no answer. Then I called the Stardust to have Robert paged. The operator put me on hold for what seemed like an eternity. I was just about to hang up when….
I’d been just about to hang up when I heard Robert’s voice on the other end of the phone. “Where are you?” he asked me. “Socorro, New Mexico,” I said. “Good, you’re on your way!” He told me what had happened to him. That Sunday night, with nowhere to go, he crashed behind a church in an abandoned cardboard box. The police came around and picked him up and booked him for Vagrancy. He had just gotten out of jail that very evening and had been walking through the lobby of the Stardust Hotel on his way to his rented locker when he heard his name being paged.
Think about that. If I’d been on time, as planned, I’d have missed him. I took just enough time farting around on the cloverleaf and finding that little dump of a motel. If that isn’t fate, then I don’t know what is!
Happy to have touched base with him, I literally floated out of the lobby back into the car and onto the freeway. I made it to Albuquerque at midnight and stopped off in the first motel I saw on Interstate 40. I had directions to where Robert was staying and I would be there the next day. I slept like a log, dreamless, that night. The motel was decent. It wasn’t so bad that you wanted to levitate across the room in your sock feet. The air conditioning was freezing cold, the drapes were thick, letting no desert sun in, and blocking out all the street lights and sounds.
I woke up and got going around eight a.m. the next morning. Breakfast was provided in the form of strong hot coffee and an assortment of donuts and muffins. I gorged on blueberry muffins and coffee. I stood outside my car looking at the day ahead of me. The air was clear, clean and thin. The sun was shining. I thought to myself at that moment that there wasn’t anything on earth prettier than a New Mexico morning. And coming from me, decidedly NOT a morning person, that was a very high compliment.
WIDGETIZE