My American Tragedy
I just got back from a road trip and, of course, I've got to write about it. You can add this one to the continuum of things written by a dude who took a trip and thinks people want to hear about it. What is it about exploring the vastness of this country that fills us with the desire to put pen to paper or, in my case, two fingers to the keyboard? What is there to find at the rotten heart of America? Can men and women ever truly be friends? Well, that’s what I’m hoping to get to the bottom of here.
This was the fourth long distance road trip of my adult life. My first trip was back in 2011 and it took place just four days after being broken up with. I had planned a very long road trip with my then-girlfriend. We had plans to go all the way to Florida and then to loop back and end the trip in San Francisco at the Outside Lands music festival. But, with my travel budget now slashed in half, I instead opted to visit some family in Las Vegas and Idaho. After that I spent a few days in Portland, Oregon and even made it up to Seattle for a little bit. On my way back home I decided to visit a friend in San Francisco and while we commiserated about our recently broken hearts over a few beers, he suggested I move to the Bay Area and get my groove back, as it were. Within two months, I had packed up what little belongings I had and moved to San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. My time in the Bay lasted just under three years.
The second long road trip I took was in 2018. That time I was accompanied by a longtime-social-media-friend-turned-irl-homie who needed to get away from her life for a bit. I was moving to Minneapolis to start a new chapter in my own life and she was going to ride with me until she found a city that suited her. She slept most of the way and ended up staying in Omaha, Nebraska while I drove the rest of the way to Minnesota alone.
I had a blast in Minneapolis. I had great roommates, a decent job, dated a few people casually, and with a growing group of friends I felt like I was going to be there for the long haul. I thought maybe I’d meet someone special and settle down. Maybe this brown kid from the San Fernando Valley (shout out) would put roots down in the Midwest and come up with his own variation on Hotdish.
A guy can dream.
Sadly, my transformation into a salt of the earth Midwesterner was not to be as I had to move back to Los Angeles just four months into my new adventure. Life had brought me back to where I needed to be and kept me there for quite a while.It was quiet on the long road trip front for a long time. The occasional trip to Vegas or the central coast of California notwithstanding, I didn’t really get a chance to hit the road in earnest for almost six whole years.
When I moved back to Los Angeles in July of 2018, I was dealing with a set of drastically changed circumstances in my personal life and I had to make the best of it. My family had suffered a tragic loss and I felt duty-bound to come back home and deal with the fallout and become the de facto leader of the family for a time. It wasn't all bad, though. I joined a few bowling leagues, got involved in political organizing, engaged in lots of community based work, and even ran for city council in LA’s 13th district (4% of the vote never looked so good). My sweet road trippin’ time was being eaten up by things like learning how much of the city budget gets used up by the LAPD ( $1.735 billion in 2018 vs $2.14 billion in 2024) and what it feels like to lose in the primary. All valuable lessons, but the road still called my name.
Early 2023 saw the end of a long term relationship and I once again wanted to hit the road. I had a break up to process and needed to learn the lessons only the road can teach you (what they are, I cannot tell you) but I was broke so I couldn’t get myself further than Santa Barbara and who the hell has ever learned any life lessons in Santa Barbara? It’s too pretty. I scraped by for the rest of 2023, taking odd jobs to make money and using EBT to feed myself. I found myself wondering, is the road missing me as much as I miss it?
At the beginning of 2024, a longtime social media friend followed up on my vague offer to “Get drinks sometime” and love bloomed. My financial fortunes changed later in the year and I could hear the familiar susurrations of the road and, this time, I was ready to answer the call. My partner had committed to going to school in Pittsburgh and when the time came for her to relocate, I followed suit with a half-baked plan to make PGH my new home. So in August of that year we hopped into the old jalopy, attached a U-Haul trailer to the back of it, and set forth like many couples have before and many have since and hit that sweet open road. We took our time getting to Pittsburgh and in total we were on the road for 11 days. We passed through Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, Cheyenne, Kansas City, St Louis, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati.
After six years of having to stay put in Los Angeles, being back on the road felt like breaking some invisible shackle that had stifled my wandering spirit. Family obligations had prevented me from exploring for so many years but once I had the chance to leave again, I took it. I had fulfilled a duty to my family and my reward was putting a little distance between us…at least for a little while.
For a long time I couldn’t picture myself not being in Los Angeles at the beck and call of family. But there I was in Denver eating mediocre Chinese food, there I was in Kansas City in an insanely disorganized but wonderful thrift store, there I was in Cincinnati sleeping in a shack we found on airbnb that looked like it could have been a hideout for the Unabomber. So many times during that trip I had to take a moment to myself, breathe deeply, and say: “Here I fucking am.”
My time in Pittsburgh only lasted about 2 months. I came back to Los Angeles in mid October to take care of a few things and for my joint birthday and going away party. What none of the guests at my party knew was that I was in the midst of a break up and was more than likely coming back to Los Angeles after telling everyone that mattered to me that I was done with it but this time for real. Half of my earthly possessions were sitting in a storage unit on the opposite side of the country and I had no clue when I would go back and get them. I partied hard the night of my birthday. Friends from every phase of my life showed up. High school friends mingled with friends I’d met while working at coffee shops. Concert friends and people who had followed me on social media for years came by and took shots and sang karaoke with me. I sang a haunting rendition of Blink 182’s “Adam’s Song” and drunkenly belted The Smiths’s “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” (to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die, etc.) while someone came up to me and shouted, “I VOTED FOR YOU!!!” At the end of the night, after everyone had left, I sat alone on the couch and wondered where my life was going.
In the following days the break up became official.
Two weeks later, a very painful chapter in my family’s history was closed and I found myself floating around again. Do I leave as I have before or do I stay in LA and figure some shit out?
I chose to figure some shit out and for the first time ever I had my own apartment, I had time and energy and I had resources with which to build a nice little life for myself. 2024 had ended, and for the first time in a long while, I decided to rest. I chose to enjoy my time and not let it be taken up by things that stressed me out or that didn’t ultimately matter. My time became more precious to me than it ever had been and I became much more selective of who got an audience with me. Not to sound like one of those people who spouts platitudes like “Know your worth!” but every now and then, you have to take the inspirational art pieces at Home Goods seriously and live, laugh, love.
I had a housewarming party to celebrate my new apartment and show off my very cool new couch and I felt surrounded by love and light and all that beautiful shit. It’s a wonder what money can do for your mental health in such a short amount of time.
A few weeks ago I went to a friend’s birthday party and had a very good time. We danced and sang and celebrated being alive but at the end of the night I found my mind wandering to the road again. Usually my mind goes there when I’m stressed about my life or when my heart is broken, but this time none of those were really happening. I was on month three of rest and relaxation, I had begun to busy myself with fun projects, became quite the home chef, and my romantic prospects were abundant. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to get in my car and venture forth.
So in the middle of the night, after celebrating my friend’s 40th birthday, I rented a car and decided that I finally needed to visit New Orleans. I wasn’t sure of the route I was going to take to get there, I would just make it up as I went along. Two days later, my dad drove me to the rental place and I hit the road having told only a small handful of people what I was up to.
I had convinced myself I had to stop in Pittsburgh to empty out my storage unit. It was perhaps an attempt to make peace with that place and the fact that another relationship had ended. But, by hour 4 of the road trip I disavowed myself of that notion and didn’t think about it again. Why get bogged down in that emotional mess? Why take the risk of possibly seeing an ex? So, I bedded down in Flagstaff that first night, opened up the map on my phone and decided where I’d end up the next day. The next morning I had a cute breakfast in Flagstaff and I set course for Amarillo, Texas. On the way to Amarillo I noticed that I’d be driving through Albuquerque so as any dedicated Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul fan would, I took photos of a few of the filming locations and got some tasty Mexican food (shout out to Mary and Tito’s).
I took my time getting to Amarillo and when I checked into my room it was nearly 8pm. I was hungry and a friend told me I should go to the Big Texan restaurant because they were known for their 72 ounce steak challenge. What’s that, you may ask? If you eat a 72 ounce steak along with a baked potato, salad, and a shrimp cocktail in an hour or less, your picture is taken and you live forever in the hallowed halls of all those who finished the challenge before you and your meal is free! But if you fail, you have to pay $72 and live a life filled with shame. A diner who was seated across from me told me an interesting fact about the challenge: Only 2 out of every 10 men who take the challenge actually succeed while 1 out of every 2 women finish it. The diner seemed like he knew his stuff and told me he had seen many a woman finish the challenge. He told me that he had even seen one woman do three (!) challenges in a row!
As I sat there enjoying the absurdity of the restaurant I was in and chatting with my table mates who were a nice older couple from Arizona, a woman at another table signed up for the challenge. Would I witness history being made??? Would I be able to reach out and touch greatness?? The answer was no. She gave up 20 minutes in and said she was proud of herself for even trying the challenge. We love a self assured queen.
After my dinner at the Big Texan, I drove up the road to check out an outpost of one of my current obsessions: Buc-ee’s. I had gone to my first Buc-ee’s in 2021 in Alabama and had thought about it many times since. For those who don’t know, Buc-Ees is a chain of country store and gas station hybrids that started in Texas that has a very cute mascot named, you guessed it, Buc-ee and it offers everything you could ever possibly want while on a road trip. The inside of a Buc-ee’s is like a theme park, convenience store, and food court all rolled into one. If you’re in Texas, Colorado, Alabama, Georgia, or Daytona Beach, Florida I suggest you check it out–it’ll blow your mind. I spent $200 at Buc-ee’s that night. I bought t-shirts, a drink koozie, BBQ sauce, hot sauce, various snack foods, a Buc-ee’s baseball jersey, and a welcome mat for my new apartment. While in this strange place it struck me that I had visited Amarillo once before.
In 2018, Amarillo was the first stop on my trek to Minneapolis and back then there wasn’t a Buc-ee’s there. Back then I was a completely different person. When I left in 2018 I was running from years of having accomplished nothing in Los Angeles. I thought a new start in Minneapolis would light some fire under me. I’ll never know what my life would have been if I had stayed there, but the Albert who was in Amarillo in 2018, could never have pictured who he’d be in 2025. I was not running from anything or trying to heal a broken heart–I just wanted to have fun. So, while I was in the same place seven years later, everything had changed.
As Tom Waits once sang, “It’s the same old world, but nothing looks the same.”
You can’t stand in the same river twice.
I feel as though my whole life has been punctuated by some national tragedy occurring every few months and I’ve been disgusted and fascinated by all of them. I’ve often wondered–what are the long term effects on a populace that digests an unspeakable tragedy a few times a year? My school life was never the same after Columbine, which happened while I was in 6th grade and shaped the rest of my schooling. I saw the after effects of it all around me–whether that was the metal detectors on campus or the whispers I would hear about the “weird” kids. The kids with the painted nails and colored hair went from being considered oddballs and attention seekers to serial killers lying in wait. Truly hard times for a kid who loved the band Slayer.
Amarillo was in my rearview and my first stop before bedding down in Dallas for the night was Oklahoma City. For those who may not know, on April 19, 1995, a white supremacist militant named Timothy McVeigh used a bomb to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, killing 168 people. I wasn’t even 7 when the bombing happened but I was fascinated by it and when I got onto the internet for the first time, I read everything I could about it.
I knew I had to make a pilgrimage to this place I had read so much about just as I had felt the need to visit Shanksville, Ground Zero, and the Pentagon during my short stint in Pittsburgh. In the 30 years since the bombing, the hole left by the bomb set off by McVeigh has been filled and replaced by a beautiful garden with a reflecting pool and a field of 168 empty chairs, one for each of the victims. There's also a museum on the grounds that contains actual pieces of the old federal building and that plays a constant loop of news reports from the day. I walked around it while marveling at the sundry ephemera from the victims and even from McVeigh himself.
All of the books I read and TV shows I had watched about the attack could not prepare me for being in the very spot where so many, including 19 children, were killed. I came close to tears many times in that museum and as I left, I looked back towards the building that houses it and I saw graffiti that was painted onto the side of the building by a firefighter all the way back in 1995 that read
“Team 5
4-19-95
We Search for the Truth
We Seek Justice
The Courts Require It
The Victims Cry For It
And GOD Demands It!”
If there is a hell, Timothy McVeigh is surely burning in it.
After eating some tasty Nigerian food in Oklahoma City (shout out Naija Wife Kitchen), I headed to Dallas for the night. Of course, my first order of business after checking into my room and freshening up was to find some good ol’ Texas BBQ (shout out Terry Black’s) and see some sights. The bombing in Oklahoma City occurred in my lifetime and I was able to witness the aftermath of it in real time. But the most famous tragedy the city of Dallas ever saw happened 25 years before I was even born. The assassination of John F. Kennedy happened on November 22, 1963 and we all know the rest. While theories are endless, the murder of supposed gunman Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby sealed the deal on ever finding out what actually happened.
I’ve watched the Zapruder Film many, many times so being at Dealey Plaza the morning after I got into Dallas was pretty unreal. The famed grassy knoll is just there, and you can stand on it and watch traffic whizz by. A place that looms so large in the American psyche is just a random highway underpass that stands mere blocks away from a Corner Bakery location where the employee at the register hassled me because apparently “Restrooms are for customers only” A dark part of town indeed.
The drive from Dallas to New Orleans takes nearly 8 hours so I had a lot of time to think about Oklahoma City and Dallas and the context in which those two separate events occurred. JFK was assassinated at a time when the fight for civil rights was in full swing, a time where many oppressed people were making their voices heard and the people in power were freaking the fuck out. Timothy McVeigh grew up in an America that was shaped by the aftermath of the civil rights movement, in an America whose middle class was rapidly disappearing. While McVeigh and his ilk rightly placed blame on the government for a lack of employment opportunities and their overall worsening quality of life, they also blamed Black and brown people. They blamed affirmative action and so-called “welfare queens.” They blamed immigrants. The assassination of a president, while no doubt a blow to the American psyche, made a certain amount of morbid sense. People in power are always targets and the motive and blame are shared by the masses. The murder of 168 people by an army veteran, however, presented a horrifying new reality. In the age of mass shootings, insurrections, and simulcasted genocides in Palestine, Congo, Sudan and more, we’ve become all too familiar with the collective grief we’re made to constantly partake in.
But, as I try to distinguish these two events and find the differences, all I can see now are the similarities. The technology may be different but the horrors are the same. The Vietnam War, the assassinations of Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, the Manson Murders, and so many other things happened in the same decade that a president got his head blown off. No matter where you look, it’s already there–the same story that has always been.
I was beginning to think that my trip was going to turn into a tour of “American Tragedies” as my brother put it when I talked to him on one of the long stretches of road between my destinations. But, when I pulled into New Orleans, the heaviness of what I had seen so far faded away and I knew this city was going to treat me well. My first night there, I walked along Bourbon Street and the French Quarter and caught a few bands along the Frenchmen corridor. It was a welcome respite from the intrusive thoughts that were plaguing me. Nothing clears the mind better than a frozen daiquiri.
On my first morning in town I was told by a nice young man on the waterfront that if I sat through a 2 hour sales pitch for a timeshare, I’d be gifted three free tour tickets including one for a “spooky” New Orleans walking tour. I managed to sit through the presentation and not fork over $20,000 and once I had escaped I was ready to get haunted. The tour guide was wonderful and really leaned in to the theatre of it all. For a moment, she made me feel like ghosts were actually real! The emphasis was where it needed to be and the pauses were all timed out perfectly. A fun time, no doubt, but it left me wanting more. What good are the spirits of the dead to me, a guy who has never felt a connection to anything supernatural? In some ways I wanted to feel the darkness again. Stare into its eyes but from a safe distance.
Hearing about a woman who murdered her third husband under suspicious circumstances is good fun and walking by New Orleans’s “most haunted restaurant” makes you feel a little spooked, but those things happened so long ago that anyone who could lend any credence to the claims is long gone. No, I wanted to feel the darkness from a more modern time. On my third day in town, I took a fan boat swamp tour and had an absolute ball. Being out in the bayou with the gators and the birds was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done and I won’t ever forget it. The meals I ate there were also fantastic and meeting rapper Master P at Parkway Bakery is easily one of my top moments of the year. But I’m not writing this to give you tips on where to eat or what to see when in New Orleans, no I’m writing this in part because on my final full day in town, the darkness once again showed itself to me.
One of the tickets I'd been given for attending the sales pitch was for a city tour where they drive you around historic parts of the city and tell you why they’re important. We visited one of NOLA’s famed cemeteries with its grave plots eerily above ground and then we drove through neighborhoods that were underwater after Hurricane Katrina hit back in 2005. Lake Pontchartrain looked so peaceful on that day, one might find it hard to believe it had caused the deaths of over 1,800 people. I remember watching the news around the time Katrina made landfall. I was nearly 17 and living in California, far away from the flood, but watching it unfold in real time as I had done with so many tragedies over the years. Touring the areas that Katrina flooded was surreal. If the tour guide hadn’t pointed out the reinforced levees and houses that had been raised to prevent being lost to future hurricanes, you would never know how many souls had perished there and just how many futures were permanently altered in an instant.
The wounds are all around us, we just have to know where to look.
After the tour bus dropped us off at our respective hotels I decided to head to Bourbon Street and find a drink. With a daiquiri in hand, I did a giant loop of Bourbon Street and the French quarter and decided to stop by St. Louis Cathedral to light a candle for some dead friends and relatives. Growing up in a Mexican household means I’ve lit many candles for dead loved ones over the years, even if it doesn’t really hold any religious importance to me. I left the cathedral and was looking for my next stop when I stumbled upon a memorial right next door. At first I thought it was a Katrina memorial since it was nearly the 20 year anniversary, but when I got closer I realized it was to memorialize 14 people who had been killed at the beginning of 2025 on Bourbon Street. Apparently, someone had driven their truck onto Bourbon street on New Year’s Day, ran a bunch of people over, and then died in a shootout with the police. I had been in Las Vegas for a wedding when the attack happened and when I had gotten back home to Los Angeles, the city was on fire (we have tragedy at home!) so I had somehow completely missed news of it happening.
So far in my travels, the trauma and the darkness I encountered were from another time. Some of it was from before my time here on earth and some of it was from when I was too young to really make sense of it; but here was a memorial for something that had happened just three months earlier. It happened on a street that I had walked down only three days before. I had noticed a large police presence and more barriers than I’m used to seeing but I’d just assumed it was the New Orleans police department flexing their bloated budget. I had no clue that when I was walking in a sea of very drunk people I was perhaps also walking by a spot where someone lost their life. I wasn’t sharing in the collective feeling of suspicion and fear that those who knew about the attack were feeling. I was too busy thinking about JFK and Oklahoma City and my own personal tragedies to even think that I might be killed while walking down Bourbon street drinking one of those sweet, sweet daiquiris. I looked at the pictures of the dead and thought about what their families must be going through. Every lost life affects hundreds of people. Those people are now without a child, a sibling, a dear friend. Whatever stories that person had are now lost to the ether. Their voices and their laughs forever etched in the minds of those who loved them.
New Orleans was phenomenal and kind of the entire point of the road trip. I had rented a car for two weeks and by the time I was done in NOLA there was a full week to go before I had to be back in Los Angeles to return it. I had contemplated going further east and maybe trying to visit Florida for a couple of days and then I had an idea to finally see Atlanta but if I did either of those things I wouldn’t have as much time to explore on my way back to California. With the heaviness of the trip so far eating away at me, I decided to lean into the darkness instead of running away from it. Sure, I could have just seen some fun sites and bought more Buc-ee’s swag and called it a trip, but I wanted to keep exploring the rot at the heart of this fate blackened land.
After mailing a few postcards and leaving New Orleans, I had decided that my stop for the night would be Little Rock, Arkansas. Along the way, I picked up some food at a Waffle House (shout out) in Jackson, Mississippi and spent a few hours in Memphis, Tennessee. My goal for my short time in Memphis was to go to the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated back in 1968.
1968 was a bad year for men who filled people with hope. MLK was killed in April of that year and just two months later, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated mere minutes from where I’m currently writing this piece. I’ve walked the grounds of the school that stands in the spot where the Ambassador Hotel was and have even gotten drunk at the bar that RFK’s assassin drank at before gunning him down (shout out HMS Bounty) but I’d only seen the Lorraine Motel, the spot where MLK’s life was ended, in pictures.
Next door to the Lorraine Motel is the National Civil Rights Museum so I decided to check that out first. When I pulled up to the museum I was right behind a big group of middle school kids on a field trip. They were laughing and teasing each other while going through the museum’s exhibits and it reminded me of field trips I took in school and how I couldn’t have cared less about art or history, I was just happy to not be at school. When I left the museum I stood outside of the hotel where MLK lost his life and I just took it all in.
To stand in that parking lot and look at the spot where the world stood still was about as close to a spiritual experience a guy like me can get. Everything sort of faded into the background for a bit and I wondered what he’d think of what the world had turned into. He couldn’t have imagined that the work he did would be undone in so many ways and not just by the people who opposed him but those who wanted to co-opt his message and use it for their own gain. A dream died at the Lorraine Motel. A great man’s life was ended and the world kept turning. What a shame.
My drive to Little Rock was uneventful, but I did get to see the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid on my way out of Memphis so that was pretty cool, I guess. I bedded down in Little Rock for the night and my dreams were of the Clintons: Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, and “I’m with her” swirled around my head. After waking up in a cold sweat, I set forth once again. I knew my trip was winding down and I started to think of what I wanted to do with myself when I got back. Do I try to find a job? Do I throw myself into a creative endeavor? Do I fall in love with someone, knock her up, and live the dad life I’ve always wanted to? There was much to contemplate. Every other road trip I’d taken up to this point had led to some big life change; a move to the Bay Area, a false start to a new life in Minneapolis, a failed relationship in Pittsburgh. But what would come after this one?
I would have a lot of time to think about these questions as I set my course for Austin, Texas but before I got there I knew I had to stop at a place that had fascinated me for years and that was, conveniently, on the way. If the Oklahoma City bombing was the opening salvo in a nascent race war started by white supremacists, the next stop on my trip was where many of those engaged in that war found their inspiration.
It was finally time to visit Waco.
The Waco Siege lasted 51 days. At the end of it 76 Branch Davidians, including anywhere between 20-28 children, were dead. What started as a standoff between an isolated religious sect and the federal government, ended in burnt out buildings and dead bodies on the evening news. The jury is still out on whether or not the federal government set fire to the compound or whether the Branch Davidians did it themselves, but most folks will concede that the ATF crossed the line.
Driving onto the grounds where the compound once stood, I felt an eerie sense of calm. A few small houses line the side of the road that leads up to the memorial building but no one who lived there cared to come out and say hi. The entire compound burned during the siege so the main building that stands on the grounds is a recreation of the building where David Koresh would hold sermons surrounded by his followers and his many wives, some of whom were not even 18 years old. The suggested donation to check out the memorial was $10 and I happened to have cash on me. So I put a crisp $10 bill into a black box and a nice looking older white lady let me and a family who’d pulled into the memorial the same time I had into the building.
Stepping inside the building was like stepping into a photo I had seen hundreds of times. The folks who put together the memorial–including the woman who let me in, the wife of a former Branch Davidian member who had raised the money to build it–had recreated everything to a T, save for the stadium seating that was needed to seat all of Koresh’s acolytes. The stage at the end of the building was outfitted with drums, a microphone and various instruments that Koresh and co would play during sermons. The walls were plastered with so much information, it was a bit overwhelming. A huge chunk of pictures with the history of the Seventh Day Adventist movement here and a large collage of photos praising and damning Koresh there. I read every single piece of writing on those walls while the sound of a rickety ceiling fan filled the air. Before I left, I walked the grounds a bit more and came across a hole in the ground with a sign above it that read, “Vault where the mothers and children were gassed.”
We may never know what fully transpired the day the 51 day standoff came to an explosive end, but what cannot be denied is that children were killed that day by their parents and by federal agents.
David Koresh and his crew loved guns and they believed in a radical version of Christianity which included child marriage. Koresh himself slept with, married, and had children with many of the wives and young daughters of his followers. It was no surprise that the government finally came calling and when I spoke to the woman who seemed to be the memorial’s caretaker, she seemed ambivalent about the whole thing. She said she didn’t agree that Koresh was the resurrection of Christ as he claimed but that the government had overstepped its bounds. After all, according to her, “All those people were here by their own free will. Everything that happened here was consensual.” That was my queue to leave.
There isn’t much to say about Austin except that even when I thought the darkness that had been present on this trip was gone, it showed itself to me once more before I left the city. I hadn't planned on seeing anybody I knew while I was in town because my good friend who had moved there last year was out of town so I figured I’d play lonely tourist once more. I realized on my second day in town that an old friend of my sister’s lived in Austin, so I messaged her to see if she wanted to meet for a quick catch up. On my way to meet up with her I drove past the campus of the University of Texas at Austin and caught sight of a tower I had seen many times before but couldn’t place. It took me several loops around the campus before I realized that that tower was where Charles Whitman committed one of America’s earlier mass shootings back in 1966. He killed 17 people and injured 31. Nearly 60 years have passed since the shooting and still no one’s quite sure why he committed all those murders on that scorching August day. Some say it was due to external stressors like the divorce of his parents or the fact that he was discharged from the army for gambling. And some say it was likely due to the pecan sized brain tumor found during his autopsy. So, while we may never fully know why he did it we certainly know that he wasn’t the last person to hack away at our sense of safety. We’ve become all too familiar with days filled with terror and nary a lesson being learned in their aftermath.
History doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes.
I met with my friend and we talked about our love lives and hopes for the future. We talked about my sister. It was nice to see a friendly face after spending most of the trip in solitude. The long drives and stretches of being alone in a bustling city can make even the most extroverted person feel lonely. Austin proved itself to be a great city with legendary BBQ and a gorgeous lake I had the pleasure of kayaking down. Just as every major city seems to now have its share of coffee shops, record stores, and luxury condos, so too do they have history they’d rather forget. I wondered how many college kids even knew their school was the site of a mass shooting. Or how many kids who live in Waco know the story of the Branch Davidians? Is it taught as fact or is it folklore? A ghost story shared by generations or a cautionary tale? Perhaps as a warning about blindly following a zealot who doesn't care about anyone but himself and will eventually lead many to their untimely deaths…
My trip was winding down and I looked at the map and chose Roswell as my penultimate stop on this here road trip. When I was a kid I was obsessed with and terrified by aliens and being abducted by UFOs. Whenever I’d be in the car with my parents at night I looked to the sky to see if I could spot a UFO even though I knew if I saw anything even remotely suspicious, I would freak the fuck out. I’d read so much about Roswell and Area 51 over the years and felt like it was time to check one of those places off of my proverbial list of buckets. I mentioned going to Roswell to someone in Texas and they said I should be prepared to be disappointed. How could a place that I’ve been wanting to visit since I was in short pants ever disappoint me? Wouldn’t the act of even being there be enough for me?
All I can say about Roswell is that at least the town’s theming is on point. Sure, being near the site where an alien craft crash landed back in 1947 sounds cool…until you realize that the actual site is about 75 miles outside of the city and requires an arduous hike through BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land to reach. There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts with a giant alien statue outside of it. There’s a McDonald’s that is shaped like a spaceship. There’s a museum that only costs $7 to get into and will soon make you realize why. All wonderful things of course but maybe not worth more than a couple hours of your time. Hey, at least the steak I ate at the Cattle Baron restaurant was halfway decent (shoutout).
Only 15 hours of driving stood between me and my home in Los Angeles and I was ready to lay in my bed and process everything I’d just seen. My last stop after 9 hours of driving was Phoenix. I’ve spent a lot of time in Phoenix over the years and I’ve had just as many good times as I’ve had bad. The night I spent there before coming home was squarely in the “bad” column. Nothing horrible happened but when you’re so close to coming home and your hotel room sucks, it hurts just a little extra. I left early the next morning and made it back home on a Saturday afternoon. I came home with a few hundred dollars worth of gifts for friends, a suitcase filled with freshly laundered clothes, and 5,200 new miles on a rental car.
It’s funny, the last major stop on my trip was the one I really wanted to blow my mind and it fell very short. It loomed large in my mind for so long yet it underdelivered and reminded me of those first few disappointments you go through in adolescence. Those moments when you realize that life, for the most part, is devoid of magic, that your parents are just regular people with flaws. There were a few times on those long night time car rides when I looked into the sky and convinced myself that I saw something that was not of this world. Maybe it was me hoping there was more to this life than the trials and tribulations we suffer here on earth. Maybe it was just being a kid with an overactive imagination.
I’ve been back home for two months and all I can think about is hitting the road again. Now that I’ve gone on a road trip without panic in my soul or lofty expectations, I feel ready to dive back in.
I traveled through cities that were home to national tragedies so it was easy to focus on those and forget about the fact that every single town I drove though was home to countless other tragedies both big and small. Sure, the big ones are what everyone will remember but every single street I drove by, every single town I passed was home to immeasurable pain I will never know about. For every presidential assassination there are thousands of heartbreaks. For every large scale act of violence there are personal hells that most will never know about.
Along the road to New Orleans and on the way back what struck me the most was how it all just kept going. When tragedy strikes we tend to stay still for some time but then we remember or are reminded that we have to get on with it. Sure, we can grieve and pause to consider how painful it all is, but we’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed and it goes on because it must. There is no way to outrun the darkness, no way to deny what lies in every direction.
When I first moved to San Francisco I couldn’t believe that I lived so close to the Golden Gate Bridge. After 3 years in the Bay Area, looking at that bridge would fill me with dread. It became a reminder that not everyone lives up to their potential. The chief engineer of the bridge, Joseph Strauss, built something that will stand long after we’re all gone. But how could he have known that countless people would throw themselves off of his beloved bridge because they just couldn’t take it anymore?
On the road, I saw billboards that told me that if I didn’t accept Jesus as my personal lord and savior, I was going to hell. I saw ones that told me how bad abortion was and ones that said if I needed answers, I only needed to visit their website and all of it would be explained to me. I saw billboards for DUI attorneys and tax specialists. I saw ads for adult superstores and gun shops. Come visit a monument to tragedy and then once you’re done there pick up a dirty magazine and a gun and jack off one last time before you blow your brains out. Unfortunately for you, Abraham Zapruder won’t be around to film this time.
I’ve mentioned my move to Minneapolis several times at this point and while I only spent four months living there it’s a place of great meaning to me. It was there that I got the call that my sister Mely had been shot and killed by the LAPD.
My world was shattered in an instant and I haven’t been the same since. I had left home to start a new life and so I did, just not in the way I wanted to.
After being back in Los Angeles for nearly 2 years, I had gotten heavily involved in community organizing and activism and I found myself attending several rallies in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
It took me a few days of reading about Floyd’s murder to realize that he had been killed outside of a local Minneapolis liquor store called Cup Foods, a place that was close to my house and that I visited often when I lived there.
When I got the call confirming my sister was dead, I was half a mile from where George Floyd would be murdered a little less than 2 years later. Not a repeating verse, but one that rhymes.
Lots of people were driving down my street the day I got the news about Mely. They were so close to the darkness that they could have reached out and touched it. Many people drove down the street while George Floyd was being murdered, and they could have touched the darkness in a different but still familiar form.
A cursed rhyme repeating endlessly.
They could have stopped and offered a helping hand but, as it happens, they were on their way to someplace else.
