The Cage Has Its Place
Riders call cars cages. It is meant as an insult. This week I am getting in one on purpose.
I am driving to the Catskills to see an old friend. He is 82. I am 65. We have been friends since I was 24 or 25, which is long enough that neither of us has to explain himself anymore.
The motorcycle already got its turn. St. Marys, a couple of weeks back, took care of that particular need. A bike trip is a sanctified thing. You are in the road, not on it. Pine smell coming off the shoulder, light coming through the trees in pieces, the curve setting up ahead of you, asphalt telling you something concrete never does. You do not listen to music out there. The ride is the music.
A car trip is the opposite and I am not going to pretend otherwise. You are sealed in. Your climate, your music, a moment of time and space that belongs to you and nobody else. You can skip everything around you. It is a little selfish. It also has its place.
There is a practical reason too. The car is new and has more technology in it than my first three apartments combined. Safety things, fun things, everything that beeps. Two days on the highway is how you actually learn a car.
And I get to make phone calls. Old friends, the ones I never seem to catch. Four hours of open highway is the best excuse for a long phone call that American life still allows.
Then the radio, which is the real reason. Local AM and FM, college stations, whatever bleeds through the mountains. Music, news, somebody taking calls about a zoning board, a swap show at ten in the morning. Radio you would never find on purpose and cannot get anywhere else. That is not the filler between here and there. That is the trip.
The plan is simple. Out at night. One hotel. Catskills the next day. Same road home, one more night out, back in time for a gig with my band, mostly old guys and a couple who are not yet.
Here is why I am writing this down.
There is a road trip in Lenny's Vintage. Lenny and his brother drive to go get their other brother, who is sick, and it is not a short sequence. A couple of producer types have suggested cutting it. Fair note. Road sequences cost money. You are moving a crew, chasing light, burning days.
But the road trip is an American thing. It does something to people. Say the words out loud in a room and everybody goes somewhere private for a second, and what they see is theirs, not mine. I want that in the movie. I want their version sitting right next to mine in the dark.
Am I flexible? Sure. Get me a producer and we will talk. That is a good problem and I would like to have it.
In the end both kinds of travel do the same work. The bike makes you pay attention. The car lets you stop paying attention. Either way you come back with your head straightened out and a list of things you are grateful for, which is where I keep landing lately.
Two wheels, four wheels. Just go.