Ride Across The River, by Tom Dinard

My friend Jack had his learner’s permit and his father’s throwaway Buick Regal. I had no one to report to. My mother was in Brazil and my father was at his girlfriend’s place in Jersey. Up until now, my ventures to the city consisted of box lunches with forty classmates at the Museum of Natural History, arduous holiday evenings in an Upper East Side high-rise watching my grandparents get older and the rest of my family get angrier, and the requisite stops on the tourist track — the observation deck at the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty, the Guggenheim or the Central Park Zoo. I knew that the buildings were tall and plentiful, that some of the people scared me, and that the place smelled like pretzels in the winter and piss in the summer.

Until now, I had learned all this as a passenger — ballast on a family boat. For years, my nose had been pressed against auto glass as I looked out at gas tanks, litter-dotted department store lots, discount supermarkets, boarded-up houses, overgrown parks and bays that meandered to the Atlantic through a maze of sewage plants and dredged-up temporary islands under lonely bridges.

Every road was caked in dirt, even in winter, when the snow’s black outlines flashed on and off to the rhythm of multi-colored Christmas lights in front of block-long thatches of two-family houses in Queens or Brooklyn or right down the street from where I waited in my driveway in Long Island. The crammed chaos worked for millions, so I assumed that it worked for me. Tonight I’d stop assuming.

Jack pulled up at midnight, fresh off a shift at the Fantasy Theatre. He screeched into my driveway as I ran toward him, catching the Nerf football I had been chucking to myself beneath the light attached to the telephone pole in the neighbor’s front yard. The interior of the Regal stunk of gas and the dulled leather seats still seemed as cold as the December air. He flashed me his best knowing grin. He had been waiting for this moment.

I put in “Making Movies” by Dire Straits. Jack didn’t know that I had spent the past four months trying to go to sleep every school night while the first side of this cassette — “Tunnel of Love,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Skateaway,” that’s all — played over and over until my sister banged against the wall for it to stop. She didn’t understand that at 15, all I could do was dream of someday finding a girl like the one Mark Knopfler sang about — a girl I might lose in the dusty wake of a departing pickup or one I’d profess eternal love to while comparing her to the timeless beauty of the seaside fairground where I first heard loud rock and roll.

Jack took the Southern State to the Cross Island to the Grand Central to the BQE to Queens Boulevard to the 59^th Street Bridge — the only toll-free way to cross the East River that he knew of. The skyline shot up before me as the tires hit Manhattan. Our first stop was a corner grocery to “load up.” It was open all night and the guy at the register sold us six Bud tallboys without hesitating. I got a Coke, too.

We drove down Broadway to the Tower Records in the Village. I’d never seen anything like it. Four floors, each of them as big as a parking lot, and all of them packed with people, even at one in the morning. They had “Making Movies” and every other Dire Straits record I’d heard of, plus about ten I hadn’t. Jack bought the new UB40 and something by Joan Armatrading and an import single by Bronski Beat. I got “Brothers in Arms.”

We inhaled pizza at Ray’s and hot dogs at Gray’s Papaya. We ambled uptown so Jack could show me his aunt’s apartment building on the Upper West Side. My head spun from window to window: art-house cinemas, vintage clothing stores, barbecue joints, sushi bars … one blending into the next. Jack stopped at a gas station and I walked into the mini-mart for a Snickers. I caught a quick glimpse of myself in the security mirror. I was just another dude in a winter hat, coat, jeans and sneakers. Just another city dweller at three in the morning, looking for something but sure as hell not being judged by anybody else for doing it.

Jack steered the car onto First Avenue, heading uptown. He stared at the concrete canyon laid out in front of him and smiled with greed at the emptiness. “It’s never like this,” he said, gunning the old Buick and kicking off solo drag race.

Fifty. Sixty. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. Every light green. “Yes!” he shouted. “One hundred miles a fuckin’ hour.” He pumped his fist.

I craned from side to side, as fast as I could, watching the United Nations and a thousand other landmarks get sucked into the dark behind us.

***

And Tom’s big wheels keep on turning, neon burning up above …

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