June, 2001: A Drive
By: Michael Ethan Gold
Tags: Youth, LGBTQ, High School, Fiction, Short Story

Brian had expected his weekend with Gabriel to anchor down the floating quality of his summer days, the irregularity with which time passed. Things had been so busy at the end of the year, final exams and state championships and last hurrahs of junior year, they’d barely been able to see each other, let alone find time for privacy and sex, racing against the whirlwind of activity.

When Gabriel’s birthday finally came, Brian dreaded it, having to share Gabriel with his swimming teammates, trying to ignore the awkwardness of his own light, delicate presence tossed into the scrum of iron-clad almost-men. He’d balked when Chris Martinez used his fake I.D. to buy them a six-pack that they’d hid under the table at Pizza-A-Gogo, taking swigs when the wait staff wasn’t looking, Brian’s heart racing every time an open can touched someone’s lips, puddles of beer forming from assorted spills and splashes onto their piles of cheese and marinara sauce, the smell of alcohol-tainted factory food wafting conspicuously from their corner of the diner.

At the time he had a vague sense of how his body would react to the alcohol, a feeling creeping in already, now slow, now fast, now removed from all sense of time, settling in at the point where his eyebrows met, where they would build and concentrate, turning normal memories into static-obscured film clips, remnants of a night that Brian would replay in his head again and again over the coming weeks, squeezed together on Gabriel’s soft, queen-size bed, the first night they’d spent together in ages, waves of pent-up lust spilling out from narrow points in their anatomy. They kissed over and over again after they’d finished, as though congratulating each other, as though proud, Brian letting each kiss click into place, granting it physical form somewhere in his mind, securing it, latching it down, toiling against its impermanence, the waves and atoms and subtle disruptions in space-time that would characterize their existence in five seconds, in five minutes, an hour, a day, a year.

Over breakfast, he observed Gabriel’s movements in detail, their lightness and succinctness at odds with his bulk, the muscle he’d laid down seemingly overnight, since the end of freshman year when Brian still remembered him as a lithe and lanky adolescent, a stick figure with a big head of dreamy black eyes and impossibly thick hair and freckles that boggled the mind in their boldness.

“I want to get my freckles lasered off,” Gabriel griped between mouthfuls of Special K.

“No fucking way.”

“People stare at me everywhere. I hate it.”

“You’re insane.” Brian reached across the table to touch one, perched high and prominent on Gabriel’s left cheekbone. “You know that every girl in school is obsessed with them.”

“They are not.”

Brian lifted a spoonful of cereal to his mouth, crunching it through his naked teeth, his retainer resting on a napkin on the table, saliva darkening the white fabric in a small wet circle. He thought back to the night before, how hard he’d bit down on the rigid plate of metal and plastic, so septic and mechanical, the antithesis of everything else going on in the bed right then, the flows and floods and exchanges that only organic lifeforms were capable of.

The weather was warm, sunny and dry that day, a bright blue canopy pulled taught over the Palo Alto streets. Saturdays still maintained a hint of magic even in the summer, the promise of a kind of liberation within liberation, their time free and open, parents and friends and obligations tomorrow’s concern. The morning passed slowly, a holiday’s languid torpor smothering their minds, waking rolling into showers rolling into breakfast rolling into nothing, the glass door to Gabriel’s backyard slid wide open, a cool breeze wafting through the house, the wind carrying the scent of trees and the water from the Japanese stone fountain, dappled light illuminating the furniture, the sun warming Brian’s skin as they reclined on the couch.

At one point Gabriel suggested a drive. Brian’s ears perked up — would this be the usual meandering, the slivers and pockets of Palo Alto that opened up for them under the wheels of Gabriel’s car? He asked if he could practice on Gabriel’s stick shift, if he could enjoy the satisfaction he’d felt whirring the gears into life, the hum and purr of the gearbox contrasting with the dull putter of Brian’s old hand-me-down.

Gabriel agreed, letting Brian take the car out of the driveway and out onto Embarcadero, the traffic sparse and manageable, the road feels agreeing with him today, a stoplight here and there hardly derailing his confidence. Gabriel reclined in the passenger seat, a pair of sunglasses over his eyes, his hair wild and unkempt, unmolested by-product, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. A tiny Star of David rested against his chest, gold chain curving around his neck and underneath his shirt collar, its six sharp points extending out to each of his six appendages, two arms, two legs, one head, one cock…Brian wondered how much more mileage he would be able to get out of that instrument today, whether there was anything left to play.

He turned on the radio, the classic rock station he’d discovered on his trampoline a few weeks ago, a Bowie song flowing over the airwaves, ch-ch-ch-ch-changes…

“Where to?” Brian asked.

“Take a left, up Page Mill.”

“You sure I can handle it?”

“I’ll take over when we get to Foothills.”

Brian turned onto El Camino, its multi-lane sprawl drifting in and out of his field of vision. The road felt shorter every time Brian drove it, the low-rise buildings and pedestrians passing more quickly, the pavement more compressed — even driving a stick shift, Brian needed to use only half his brain, the other half drifting to the music, Creedence now, plays a nickel tap your feet…

“I don’t like this,” Gabriel said, turning the dial, flipping it to a classical station that Brian detested. He quickly mapped out the next move in his head — Pink Floyd, he’ll like that, the density, the braininess — but in the meantime he had to give Gabriel at least ten minutes, at least to Foothills, when they would flip roles and Brian could control the sound system without worrying about skidding off the road.

Brian turned up into the gently sloping hills of Page Mill, the fast-food restaurants and car washes of El Camino giving way to genteel urban landscaping and well-manicured office parks. They switched roles at the intersection of Page Mill and Foothill Expressway, Chinese fire drill-style, fast and bumbling, Brian rapping his hip against the front bumper, keeping one hand on the waist of his board shorts, blue-and-white oversized Vans nearly flying off his feet.

They laughed as they resettled into their seats, Gabriel regaining control just as the light changed, the car revving into life as the yellow expanse of rolling hills stretched out in front of them. The road turned steeper here, the necessary vigilance over the gearbox more intensive — Brian couldn’t trust himself to drive it quite yet, and Gabriel would insist on oversight over the difficult turns.

The woods deepened as they ascended, leaving the regularity of the suburbs behind, the safety of their ivy-covered yards, a handle on a window or a knob on a door holding as much mystery as either of them would encounter on any given day. Brian shivered in the breeze streaming into the car, more organic molecules touching his skin than he would get in a month back in Palo Alto, the twisting, narrow road seeming to continue on forever.

“Foothills?” Brian asked as they approached the entrance of the vast hiking enclave, unsure of Gabriel’s intentions, starting to feel high somehow, struck by the overlapping influences of summer and Saturday and wilderness and his lover behind the wheel.

“Nah…let’s keep going,” Gabriel said. Brian couldn’t remember the last time he’d been further out on this road, ten million miles above the city below, as if they’d just blasted off into space. “I think there are some cool lookouts up here…I remember my dad taking me once.”

Gabriel sped the car along the cliffside, drop-offs nudging against them, rocks and railings and scary-looking road signs demarcating the hairpin turns to Brian’s right, glimpses of the late-morning horizon flashing past his eyes.

“Feels like Middle fucking Earth up here,” Brian said, a white S.U.V. passing them in the other direction, the traffic lanes keeping them from nose-diving into each other around the razor-sharp turn. The music had started to go haywire, static intermingling with the string orchestra on Gabriel’s radio station.

“Let me play something,” Brian said, digging through his backpack for his C.D. of Dark Side of the Moon. The isolation of the high hills spurred his anticipation of the music as he slipped it into the drive, the discovery of the notes a split-second before they emerged, his ears on one type of primitive stimulus, his eyes on another, the greens and browns of the jungle outside contrasting against the reds and purples of “Breathe.” The beats and pauses and sonorous voice of Roger Waters grew more expansive as they emerged, echoed by the Beamer’s throbbing bass, the sound dynamics painstakingly leveled out by Gabriel to capture that balance of deep and shallow, of light and shade.

“You didn’t make me listen to this before, did you?” Gabriel asked, sunglasses in his lap, eyes both vacant and attentive.

“No. This is Pink Floyd.”

The trees gave way at various turns to views over Palo Alto and the Bay, Gabriel slowing down to let them take in the scene, the sun on full tilt overhead, illuminating miles of blue and gold, the heat from the cloudless sky cut by wind through the open windows. “On the Run” now blasted from the speakers, synthesized heartbeats flying in waves, Brian trying to compel Gabriel to capture them, to experience them at his core.

Photo by Mike Petrucci on Unsplash

“It’s interesting. Sounds experimental.”

After a few minutes, the opening ticks of “Time” echoed across the landscape, the ridges upon ridges of trees that filled the valleys underneath them, the emerald-coated mountains announcing that they’d left the overhang of Palo Alto and entered the true wilderness.

Brian felt like they’d crossed a barrier, a threshold, passed into something exceptional to their mundane lives — suddenly, he felt an acute pang of longing for the younger Gabriel, the screams of “The Great Gig in the Sky” bringing him back to childhood, to sixth grade, escaping from homework onto Brian’s trampoline, bouncing to the point of exhaustion, watching the sky turns to night as Brian’s mother cooked dinner in the kitchen window.

“Money” set his shoulders moving, a few honks from the saxophone reminding him of the song’s construct, the fact that it was nothing more than sound waves, a jolt to the world’s regular rhythm. “Where are we going?” he asked, the journey has taken them so far that the earth seemed unrecognizable, still on the same road connecting them to the Radio Shack and J.C.C. back in town, but no longer in the same epoch, the same span of geologic time. They passed houses, large, rustic beasts set well back from the road, their mailboxes bearing flags and numbers and gray and brown plates of armor, never opened, never touched, not even once.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “Just going.”

“Us and Them” slowed down Brian’s pulse, the electronic instruments cascading over the beat, rolling along with the car wheels, the road flattening out as they entered a grove of old-growth redwoods, Gabriel slowing down to admire their stature, spires of pine needles and crinkles of dark bark filling Brian’s eyes, audio and video and memory and sensation moving at different speeds, the sun eclipsed by giants, no longer there to guide them.

“It’s gorgeous out here.” Brian thought he could leverage the solitude to disorient, to disengage fully over the final few minutes of the album. “Do you want to pull over for a little while?” he asked, placing a hand on Gabriel’s thigh, the wide muscle contracting under his finger pads, filling his jeans and stretching them out like tights.

“Nah,” Gabriel said, accelerating again. “Let’s keep going…I think this road goes all the way to the ocean.” The album ended, the last few heartbeats receding into the distance, the laser sputtering out, all the awe and wonder and amazement reduced to nothing more than encoded messages locked up in digital cages, precision components of plastic and metal tucked away in their tiny beds, dormant and still, waiting for the next set of instructions: engage, alight, convert, transmit.

“Where the hell are we?” Brian asked, the landscape more alien now, rocks and moss and shades of civilization like nothing he recognized back home, RVs and farming equipment and a Christmas tree depot basking in the June sun, rows of neat firs locked in sun-drenched stasis.

“Looks like Pescadero Creek Road,” Gabriel said, eyeing a signpost.

“Did we turn?”

“Not really…the road changed the name a few times.”

“What city are we in?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere near the Pacific.”

Indeed, the salt smell was inescapable, a richness to the air that Brian hadn’t experienced in ages. The surroundings felt wilted from moisture, pockets of water emerging every few feet, a placid blue lagoon hugging the road after a sharp turn, its surface dazzling in the sunshine, hemmed in by sand bars and erosion-weathered boulders, the unmistakable markers of the Pacific Ocean splayed out everywhere, a sign pointing the way to the beach just ahead.

“I can’t believe I drove all the way here,” Gabriel said.

“Me too,” Brian replied, his voice heavy with indulgences, sex and the open road and the majesty of nature, curious how much the star on Gabriel’s chest colored his perceptions, whether this beauty was to him a manifestation of God, the divine art of an all-knowing creator, or whether he saw it as Brian did, as a nothing but a context for experience, something valuable in and of itself, divorced from such lofty considerations as religion or spirituality.

Photo by Bahman Adlou on Unsplash

“What do we do now?” Brian asked, the narrow ribbon of Highway 1 putting a stop to their turn less journey, the road that linked the suburban pastures of Palo Alto to the end of the known universe finally reaching its terminus at the yellow-gold beach stretched out in front of them.

“Enjoy the view,” Gabriel said.