So Long, Chester Wheeler(56)

“I heard you talking about it on your front porch with some of the other members of your extended fruit bowl.”

The barbs were sticking under my skin, but so far I was letting them go by.

“We weren’t going to move here. We were thinking about Santa Barbara. Or possibly San Francisco.”

“San Francisco!” he cried.

Of course, I was not surprised. I’d known as soon as it was out of my mouth that I’d given him the opening, and that I should have seen it coming.

“Mecca!” he fairly sang. “The holy pilgrimage for your people!”

I slammed my palm down hard on the dashboard and he jumped.

“All right, that’s enough, Chester! What is wrong with you, anyway? You sat right in this Winnebago and told me you ribbed me and ribbed me and ribbed me about being gay, but then when I got a shot at you, I let it go by. And now you’re still doing it?”

He drew back into himself then, and got quiet. Needless to say, it was a blessing and a relief.

About twenty minutes later, when we’d managed to crawl three or four miles, he meekly spoke up.

“What time do you think we’ll get there with all this traffic?”

“At the rate we’re going,” I said, “it should be sometime next month.”



An hour later we had managed to move west of the heart of the city, and traffic thinned out some. We were doing thirty miles per hour and it felt like flying.

I took the cutoff for the 187, which was really just another way of saying Venice Boulevard. From there it was a straight shot to the beach. My map app said it was less than seven miles.

“How much farther?” Chester asked.

“Not far. We’re almost there.”

“Maybe we should turn back.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Please tell me you’re kidding me.”

“You told me you’d turn around anytime I asked you to.”

“After everything we just went through to get here?”

He didn’t answer, and I didn’t stop driving.

A minute or two later he said, “I’m scared to do this, Lewis.”

“I know you are. I don’t blame you.”

“You don’t?”

“Of course not. I’m sure I would be, too, in your situation. But I think you need to do it. I’m not going to force you to do it, but I’m going to drive you to this guy’s house, and we’re going to sit there for a while and see if you can manage it.”

No reply.

By then I’m pretty sure we were in Venice, and the scenery had begun to change. There was an atmosphere to it. Something I hadn’t experienced before. It was . . . I’m not sure how to describe it. It was like this informal circus, performing spontaneously on the street.

The streets were crowded with people on foot, on inline skates, on skateboards. Walking dogs in costumes. Riding bikes one handed, holding surfboards under the other arm. The buildings were covered with brightly colored graffiti and murals, and it was almost hard to tell which was which. If you raised your eyes, you saw palm trees everywhere. If you lowered them, you saw homeless encampments. Everywhere.

“Mike can’t live here,” Chester said.

“He does, though.”

“But this is like a hippy place. Mike’s not a hippy.”

“I got the address from Sue. She said they keep in touch.”

“I didn’t need to know that,” he said.

I turned left onto a small street because my map directions told me to. But it didn’t seem to have an outlet, and I was uneasy about turning the boat around on it, because it was so narrow.

“Your destination is in three hundred feet on the right,” I told Chester. Because that’s what my phone told me.

“No, this can’t be it.”

“But it is.”

We rolled up to a fence. Probably there was a house behind it, but I couldn’t see anything but rooflines. The fence was about six feet high, made with vertical wood boards. They were painted with a complex mural that was very purple and contained multiple pairs of eyes, along with some orbs that seemed to depict outer space. It was a long fence, covering most of the block. I figured there must be more than one house behind it.

“You sure this is it?”

“Positive.”

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“Sit awhile and decide.”

I turned off the engine and pulled on the parking brake. Then I walked around inside the Winnie, opening all the windows. The ocean was close by—I could smell it—and the air that blew through the RV was cool. It was such a relief.

I sat down on the couch on the driver’s side—what would normally be considered Chester’s side—and closed my eyes.

A minute or two later I heard Chester say, “What? I can’t hear you.”

“I didn’t say anything, Chester.”

“Not you. I was talking to that guy.”

I saw no one. It worried me slightly, thinking Chester was literally delusional. But I stepped up into the cab to see, and there was a small, balding man pressing his face up against the driver’s window, his breath fogging up the glass. It startled me, but I tried not to let on.

I dug the key out of my pocket, slipped it into the ignition, turned it to accessory, and powered the window halfway down.