‘Ride the Highway West’

At the diner, you knew that the people you saw every day would come back the next day. I didn’t like some aspects of my job as a waitress there, like waking up when it was still dark, or having to make conversation with strangers. But I liked how the diner’s regulars always showed up, even if I didn’t talk much to them. I liked that they always came back.

My manager was called Katie. She had been at the diner since it had opened. She walked around with a limp in her gait and a knowing expression knotted into her brow. She loved to talk to anyone, which usually got her a nice wad of tips by the end of the day, unlike me. I kept my head down during shifts.

There was a customer, an old man, that had come every day since long before I started working there. He came in every morning, right when the sun was just a pink smudge in the sky. And every morning, he ordered a cup of black coffee and a plate of French toast. He would usually leave the toast untouched and spend the hour sipping his coffee and gazing out the diner window. 

I didn’t usually talk to Katie, but this old man’s daily routine had gotten the best of my curiosity. I finally asked her about him one slow morning shift. Bill was sitting across the diner, looking into his mug, but we were out of earshot, and anyway, I don’t think he could hear very well.

‘Well, that guy. Bill. He’s a sweetie,’ Katie smiled as she stacked plates, her lipstick smudged near her mouth.

‘The long story short is that he had his first date with his wife here; his high school sweetheart. She really was a catch – Charlotte was her name. They were the handsomest couple in town, that’s what everyone said, you see. They had these good looks, naturally so, just so good together. You know the kind of couple I’m talkin’ about.’

‘Well, they were a fine couple. I think Bill had big plans, once – maybe he wanted to be a painter. Or was it a writer? I think he wanted to travel the world and make a book about it, or something.’ She was staring softly over my shoulder at Bill. ‘But Bill settled down for his wife. He didn’t go travel for his book, or whatever it was. But they used to come here every single morning. Used to share a plate of French toast. I could’a watched them for hours back in those days. They’d just laugh and talk and talk. They were a sight to see, for a long time.’

It was then that the old man, Bill, had begun to rise from his seat, a slow and uncertain ascent using all his strength.

He made his way over to us at the bar. ‘Hiya, ladies.’ He said this with the confidence of a guy who once had undeniable charm, and I could see in the sunken terrain of his face how handsome he had once been.

Katie smiled at him, ‘Hey, good-lookin’! Nice to see you, as always.’

He looked around like he was trying to say something more, but he couldn’t seem to find the words. ‘I ought to be off then. Busy day ahead, don’t you know. See you tomorrow.’ And he walked out with a slow wave and a crooked smile.

We watched his hunched, shuffling figure make its way down the road, white wisps of hair battered by the wind.

Katie broke the silence. ‘His wife, she died one day. Talk is that it was a brain aneurysm or something of that sort, real unexpected. He got moved to assisted living almost decades ago now. But he still comes here, every morning, day after day, ordering the same thing. He’s real lonely, I think. It’s a sad thing to see. And he’s been getting worse with age, as we all do. Think he’s got dementia now.’ She subconsciously rubbed at the lines of her forehead. ‘At least he has here to come to.’

When I woke up the next morning, there was a stranger curled up on the floor of my room. I sat up and opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Terror slowly worked its way through me as I stared at this stranger, an old man asleep in a fetal position. I thought of reaching for my phone to call for help, but I couldn’t seem to make my limbs move.

I ran through reasons for how he might have made it into my room, and what I was to do next, but my mind was frozen by fear and the coldness of the morning. I quickly thought through the entrances to my house: locked, every night, except for the backdoor, which I never locked. Because only someone who lived in this house would know that the door can only be opened by pulling out a small pin in the top hinge.

Perhaps, then, I was imagining it – a strange, fantastical dream that had taken on a startingly realistic quality. That would make things much easier. But the sound of branches scraping the roof in the wind of a storm, the coldness of the room, and the terror that lurched through me was all too real for a dream.

The detail in this absurd scene in front of me that finally stilled my spinning thoughts was what he was wearing. He had pulled a large t-shirt over his matching pajama set, using it as a sort of blanket. Immediately, I knew the shirt. I hadn’t seen it in years, but I’d know it anywhere. It was a faded Doors shirt that my father gave me a decade or so ago. On it was the face of a young Jim Morrison, his band standing behind him. I hadn’t been able to part with it and so I kept it in a box at the bottom of my bookshelf, tucked between high school diaries. On rare occasions, I took it out and rubbed the soft, worn fabric of the shirt between my fingers. But mostly, it stayed in the box.

And so, as I sat motionless and silent except for the thudding of my heart, the lead singer of The Doors eyed me sulkily in the soft pre-dawn grey of my room.

I remember when my father first introduced me to The Doors, almost ten years ago. That had been an exciting day because my father didn’t usually let me listen to music with him. But that morning had been my birthday. 

He must have seen the way I used to look at the stacks of records lined up in his office, scanning titles with a look of wonder. How that one time when he played The Beatles I had just sat there, smiling. Because after breakfast that birthday morning, he said he had bought a record, one that he used to listen to when he was growing up.

‘It’s a perfect crazy album for a crazy girl on her tenth birthday’, he had said, flicking my chin.

‘Steve,’ my mother warned from the kitchen. My father rolled his eyes in that mocking manner that made me feel like I was in on some secret joke that only we understood.

‘I’m not that crazy, Dad.’ I liked when he was playful like this. My father had never been cold, but he had always been quiet. He was a big man with a warm red face and a small smile. He worked long hours managing the town’s quarry and after a day of work usually walked right to his office and closed the door. He took on a fleeting, ephemeral quality, and so when he did talk to me, it always felt special. 

‘Well, now that you’re in those double digits, who’s to say what you’ll be like.’ He laughed, and then his face got a bit dark and distant, like it sometimes did, and he got up and carried the breakfast dishes into the kitchen.

I sat there with my legs kicking and the excitement of it being my birthday thrumming through me. I heard my parents fighting quietly in the kitchen.

‘Steve, she’s only ten. That music is for … drug-addicts and hippies. Come on.’

‘It’s her birthday! Don’t you remember how much she loved The Beatles that one time? She’s a rock n’ roll kid at heart’. My father laughed but my mother didn’t.

‘Yes, but, Steve, I wish you had told me your plans. I had gifts for her already. I had gifts all set but now you suddenly have this exciting album’. My mom said ‘album’ like the word was made of acid. The cutlery door open and then slammed closed.

My father didn’t answer, and my mother spoke so quietly that I could only pick out a few words. ‘…even remember?... I’m always with Julie and then you … like a big super-hero’. I heard a pan crash in the sink. Then I heard my mother say she was going out to get ingredients for the birthday cake, and that she’d be back.

Their fighting didn’t bother me. It was normal, and anyway, I got a thrill from the whole discussion being about me.

My dad came back into the dining room and smiled at me. ‘My little Julie, your mother is gone for a bit. I say it’s time for some music.’ He winked, and I ran after him into his office where his turntable and rows of vinyl were kept.

He picked up a record that had a young man on it, face half sculpted by dark shadows, and The Doors printed on it in bright yellow letters. This man looked like he knew things, and like he might tell me about the things one should know about.

He pulled out the thin black disc, and he put it on the turntable.

The music began with a rumbling guitar riff, and the drums chased the bass in a hectic, trembling dance. And then Jim Morrison sang. His voice was young and undone, deep, and buttery. And excitingly angry.

I wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant, but they seemed like an invitation to somewhere I had never been before. And my dad and I listened, our stances at odds with the music. I stood there grinning with arms hung dumbly at my sides, and my dad smiled, arms crossed and foot tapping politely.

But as we stood there, we weren’t, at least for the length of the album, in our little ranch house. The psychedelic, whirling incantations of the songs whisked me away that morning, to an imaginary place both abstract and yet nearly touchable: a place of glittering casinos, empty horizons, and sunsets so red they were raw.

 I decided that morning that The Doors were my new obsession.

It was a couple weeks after that same birthday when I heard The Doors again. My mother was away for an all-day church fundraiser, and I heard the deep, velvety noise of rock reverberating through the house, like distant thunder. I leapt out of my bed and down the hallway - perhaps this was my dad inviting me to come listen. Maybe The Doors could be our special band that we listened to, only together.

I stopped at the door to his office, which was open only a crack, and looked through. My father was swaying and moving to the music, in a way I had never seen him move before. This sight stopped me from entering, and I stayed hidden in the shadows of the door.

I don’t know how long I stood there, watching, unseen. Every trembling riff and every groan of the bass, every delirious lyric, was a demand, and my father responded with a near-religious reverence. His whole body was moving and rolling, the planes of his body nicking in time to the beat. His bare feet were perched on the rug like it was all that was holding him down. In one hand, he held a crystal glass of something, and in the other, a joint that trailed smoke as he moved.

I’ll never forget just how free my father seemed that morning. And I’ll never forget how I felt as I watched my father. I remember wanting more than anything to join, but was unable to do so. There was a painful, pressing feeling in my throat, and I was stuck in the shadows of the hallway like some cheap Halloween ghost. I was paralyzed between the need to be as free as him and the absolute self-conviction that I could not move from my spot. And I didn’t step through the door. I just watched my father, loose and impassioned.

I didn’t move until the entire album had been played. I fled as my father slowed down. As I rushed to my bedroom in one breathless movement, I didn’t know that that would be the last time I ever saw my father.

In the hours following when my father was meant to come home that night, I watched my mother pace the front hallway. I was sat on the floor against the wall, watching her reflection flickering up and down in the black windows.

Eventually, my eyes started drooping. I walked nervously up to my mother.

‘Mom, I’m going to bed. I have school in the morning.’ I stood awkwardly near her.

She paused and looked at me. Her face while she was pacing had been stern and angry. Now her face crumpled a bit, her eyes taking on a soft sheen. Suddenly, almost violently, she pulled me towards her, holding me in the cage of her arms and pressing me against her in a suffocating hug. Her arms were shaking.

‘Julie,’ she whispered against my hair. ‘He left us. Julie, he’s not coming back.’

I didn’t know what to say, or how to feel. I just didn’t understand why he didn’t take me with him.

After a minute I disentangled myself and went to my room. That was when I saw something on my desk: it was a soft object wrapped up in a Stop n Shop plastic bag. I opened it to find a shirt: a hugely oversized t-shirt with Jim Morrison on it, the lead singer of The Doors. Despite everything, I loved the shirt. I was a true fan now.

A letter fluttered down from inside the shirt. It read, One day you’ll grow into it.  They only had an large size. Sorry. Ride the highway west, baby! Love, Dad.

After my father left our family, the days piled up like worn-out costumes and I remember feeling like one, too. In contrast to the vivid final memory of my father dancing, the days that followed blurred into grey, hazy loops. I remembered my mother, wiping a dish with a rag for minutes on end, eyes glazed over, entranced by the circling motion of her hand.

Motions – that is all we knew, and we went through them. School, jobs, meals. Extra shifts to make up for the loss of income. Things were planned, decisions made, life moved forward: but it moved forward with an ever-present awareness of what was missing, like a current around a rock – moving forward but always washing up on that same old thing.

My mother had closed the door to my father’s office, but left it unlocked. Whenever I was home alone, I would go in and listen to The Doors album on repeat. I listened to them endlessly. I was certain that the music of The Doors, the voice, and the words of Jim Morrison, had driven my father to leave. That the morning I had seen him dancing, he had been so moved by the music that he had no other choice but to get in his car and drive west, to Los Angeles, where I imagined Jim Morrison perpetually existed.

I imagined a lot of things back in those days, and this particular fantasy thickened into the saturation of reality. I even started to convince myself that my father had become Jim Morrison. It was a belief I was fully convinced of even though I simultaneously knew it to be impossible. I told myself he had made it to L.A., those bougainvillea-lined streets, and, upon finding Jim Morrison, had slipped inside the rockstar’s skin suit. I told myself that, rather than being a pathetic parting gift, the shirt and the note had been an invitation from my father. And so sometimes, when I listened to The Doors after school, I imagined my father, now Jim Morrison, singing and calling out to me. He was telling me to step out of the doorway and join him.

And this all made sense to me. He had to leave us. He had to leave the tightly trimmed streets of our New England suburbs. Jim Morrison showed him what freedom sounded like and my father couldn’t deny it. And I sympathized with this, because I, too, had grasped that deep desire, the need to be a part of whatever The Doors were a part of. Whatever that was, all I knew was that it was more – more than this small life.

So, of course my father left. He had to.

Sometimes the fantasies I created weren’t comforting. For years, as I tried to fall asleep, I berated myself that if I hadn’t fled from my father that morning, if I had instead stepped into his office and danced, and he had seen within his daughter the same reckless, raging spirit that was in him, then he would have taken me with him on his ride out to Los Angeles.

I would have sat in the passenger seat, and we would have watched our small suburb become a tiny forgotten thing in the rearview mirror. And on the drive out west we would have lived off beef jerky from gas stations, and maybe we would have gone to a drive-in movie on the way. 

Over the years, though, this naïve childish fantasy grew into a realization of anger, an anger that had no place to go. He had left me and my mother and had thought that leaving behind a band t-shirt would be enough. For a while, somehow, it was. But when the stack of bills became the perpetual centerpiece of our table, or when my mother tried to flirt with the tax collector, I would try and tear apart The Doors t-shirt, arms shaking with the effort but to no avail. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it, as if the t-shirt was a sort of token for a second-chance ride out west. I stuck it in the box in my bedroom and tried to forget about it.

And so that morning, years later, with Jim Morrison staring at me from the shirt wrapped around this old man, I really, truly believed, if only for a second, that my father, in this strange, aged form, had come back. He had found freedom during those years, but it had exhausted him and drained him into a shrunken specter of being. But he had finally returned. I acknowledged the subconscious reason I never locked the back door – in case my father ever came back, and I was at work, he would remember the pin in the top hinge, and could come back home.

And in this infinitesimal moment of naive belief that he had returned, I was a bit angry at him. He had gone to L.A. and left our family with no solid income or childcare. And instead of going to college, I worked as much as I could at the local diner so I could pay off the mortgage to our house and pay for my mother’s medical bills. I swear that my father leaving killed my mother. She had always been a bit stern, but I did have distant memories of having fun with her, and I remember how beautiful she was when she smiled and meant it. But when my father left, her nightly glass of wine became nightly bottles. She turned to drinking and became an angry, bitter imprint of who she once was, circling endlessly around her victimhood. This lifestyle turned her liver into a useless thing and one day she died of it, after months at a detox center that didn’t do the trick. Meanwhile, my father’s escape had been easy and pain-free. I was jealous, and angry. He had found L.A., or so I had convinced myself over the years, and I had been left behind to clean up his mess.

Despite this anger, I wanted to ask my father how it had been, all those years of freedom and rock and roll. But what I had always particularly wanted to know was how the ride out west had been. If he had stopped for that drive-in movie. I wanted to hear a long-winded, feverish story, how the road ahead really had felt like such a sweet promise, how it wasn’t just a cliché. I wanted to hear about how I would have loved it. And I almost broke the grey silence of this strange morning with that question – ‘How was the ride out west?’

As if he heard this question pressing against my lips, his eyes opened, milky with cataracts. His head raised slightly off the floor and a warm puff of air came from his mouth.

It was then that I realized he looked familiar. He wasn’t Jim Morrison, nor was he my father. My father hadn’t come back, and he never would.

It was Bill, the regular from the diner.

The fear I had felt when I first woke up, and the certainty that this visitor was some sort of disembodied spirit of my father and Jim Morrison, receded entirely. I nearly laughed at myself, and at the disparity between what I had believed and reality. 

‘Hi,’ I said as I slowly raised myself from my bed. The old man blinked back at me. ‘You’re Bill, right? From the diner? I’m Julie. I work there.’ 

He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t. I walked over, cautiously, as one might approach a small animal. I carefully grabbed hold of his arm, which was bird-bone thin, and helped him sit up. He was so light and weak that I felt like I was propping up a doll.

He worked his mouth around a bit, trying to figure out a sentence. ‘I’ve seen you in the mornings. The quiet one. Thank you – thank you.’ I nodded my head, unsure of what to say or do.

‘How did you get in here?’, I finally asked. ‘Are you lost – are you okay?’

He responded, ‘It was stormy last night. Mighty cold. And so, I thought I’d best check in on the old house. See if the windows were locked and all. I worry about the wood. It swells up with moisture. It’s an old house, you see.’ He looked around with confusion, and said softly, ‘I’m not sure how I ended up here on the floor.’ He looked bashful. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘How did you get in? It was all locked. Only people who have lived here know about how the…’

His face lit up in recognition before I could finish my sentence. ‘The pin in the backdoor? It was me who set that up. Charlotte always forgot her keys, so I made that special for her. Charlotte was my wife, you see.’

It hit me then: Bill must have lived in this house decades ago, before my family and I did.

The fear and discomfort of someone breaking into my home dissipated. Instead, I felt recognition, a feeling of complete understanding. Not only had we both lived in this house, but I recognized Bill’s attachment to it. I felt ownership over it because I had paid off the mortgage with my own money. But it was more than that: the house was the most familiar thing I knew - the only thing that hadn’t changed.

I helped him up, the Doors shirt unrolling to full length and Jim Morrison smiling back at me.

‘This is a good home,’ I said. ‘Except for that draft in the front hall.’

‘I loved this home,’ he responded, with a sort of far-off look in his eyes. ‘I wish I never had to leave it. The state put me in a retirement home down the road. Old farts.’ We both laughed softly, and he nearly toppled with the effort. I tightened my grip on him. I gave him a jacket of mine, a big one, and thick pair of gloves. I helped him into my kitchen and made him drink a glass of warm milk. I didn’t know the best thing to do for a geriatric man who has spent the night curled up on a floor. But warmth seemed like the best I could offer.

With my scarf and hat and another jacket wrapped around him, I hooked my arm around his, and we walked outside. I passed the retirement home down the road daily on my way to work, so I knew the way well. We made our way slowly, my steps faltering to match his gait, under the great, roiling swathes of grey sky.

The retirement home was a looming concrete box of a building. We entered through the automatic sliding doors into a lobby lit with clinical fluorescent lights. A tired looking woman glanced at us from the front desk. I wasn’t sure how to explain the situation, but Bill spoke up before I could.

‘Hiya, Judy.’ He gave her one of his charismatic smiles that I had seen so often at the diner. ‘Was just out for a walk and ran into my old pal here … Molly.’ I smiled uncertainly and didn’t correct him on my name.

‘Alright, Bill. You stay out of trouble, why don’t you. Make my job easier,’ Judy said.

Bill stepped away and started peeling off the jacket and gloves I had given him. I leaned closer to Judy so Bill couldn’t hear. 

‘Is there someone here who keeps an eye on him?’

‘We have attendants. But they can’t keep an eye on him 24/7,’ Judy said. ‘But if you ever feel like visiting, I’m sure he’d appreciate it. It gets pretty lonely here.’

I nodded. ‘Of course. I think I will.’ And I meant it.

I turned to Bill, who was carefully folding up the outerwear I had given him.

‘Are you okay if I leave you here for now?’, I asked.

The old man smiled and nodded and handed back my outerwear. Jim Morrison glanced at me from the folds of the shirt. Fumbling over his words, Bill asked, ‘Do you want your shirt back?’

‘No, you keep it. I’ll see you at the diner tomorrow?’

He smiled at me. ‘Of course. Where else would I be?’

A short fictional story written by Sarah Allen.