Routine Escape
Artwork by Mikayla LoBasso
Growing up in the Mojave desert, I spent my summer days digging holes in the backyard with a sun-bleached shovel and riding my bike around my neighborhood when the air got cooler in the evenings. Our air conditioning went on nearly every twenty minutes. Years later, it was the intake fan that sucked the hot air upstairs in front of my parents’ room that allowed me to sneak downstairs and through the back sliding door of my suburban tract home to meet the idling car of a high school friend out front. It provided the cover I needed. Yet sometimes, on the nights that I needed to sneak out, the air conditioner would fail to turn on, almost as if it knew of my plans. I could be saved by the wind, which blew with incredible force in our desert valley, but other nights, the wind stood still, and with it, so did the town. It was silent, a clear silence, not mucked up by the sound of crickets or bugs or traffic. Those nights, if I listened closely, I could hear the train pass from across town, a dog barking, or a car revving its engine down the boulevard a mile away. Most nights, the crisp, penetrable silence that hung in the warm air was my enemy.
I developed measures to sneak through this inconvenience. My door used to creak on its hinges, until one day I asked my father for WD-40. The floorboards in front of my bedroom creaked especially loudly, after I had accidentally flooded my bathroom at eight years old. The back sliding door used to squeak like hell. It came with the tract house and after fifteen years it had become heavy and dry in its track. It was the bane of my escape. I would stand there, applying pressure to its wooden handle, pushing until I heard the first give, careful not to make too much sound. Another give, another squeak, a terrible push, then another squeak, until I managed a crack large enough to slip through. Then, the process reversed. I was relieved when my parents replaced it with a smooth-gliding door. They were apparently as fed up with its resistance as I was, just maybe for different reasons. I was less enthused when they installed a video camera doorbell right in the path of my route of escape, though I got around that too. One day, I took my mother’s phone as she wasn’t looking and opened the doorbell app, wherein I reduced the camera’s motion detection to only see as far as the front porch, but not the side gate through which I made my routine escape. With that little trick, my parents were satisfied in knowing that I could not sneak out, and I was satisfied in knowing that I could without suspicion. I did this every night in the summers, always crossing my yard with a feeling of satisfaction at my ingenuity.
On one of these quiet nights, when the wind was not blowing, I traveled my route to meet my best friend, Johnny. He was a large, dark-skinned Salvadoran junior college student whose beat up, rusted green Toyota could be heard from down the block on nights like these. I made sure he parked down the street. I hopped in and we drove off, out to partake in what was usually the motivation of these nightly romps: copious amounts of marijuana.
Palmdale had no shortage of off-beaten paths to explore. In the ‘90s, it was known as the ‘foreclosure capital of California.’ In 2008, when I was seven years old, it repeated the title. On the outskirts of town, the faded roads of planned tract communities long forgotten made the playground in which I spent my high school years. “Took you long enough,” I said, as I put my green metal box on the floor of the passenger seat and stepped into the car.
“My mom needed help getting to the bathroom,” Johnny replied.
I remained silent. He shifted into drive and the car moved out of its idling position with a bit of a jolt. I liked how his car felt underneath me, it reminded me of old times, when we were just becoming friends and this was the only car we had. Now, we usually took my car on these nightly adventures, but it was in the shop this week for a broken hose. Though it had some bells and whistles, heated seats, a sun roof, and the kind of genuine leather that was phased out in cars long ago, it never really let me forget that it had one hundred seventy thousand miles and seventeen years under its hood. It was as old as I was, and I was sure to give it a couple of dents to add some character. I missed the rumble of Johnny’s old car underneath my seat, the purple tint peeling off from the windows. I especially missed not being the driver for once.
Johnny pulled off from the curb, swinging by my house at the end of the cul-de-sac to turn around. I always worried this move would wake my parents. In five minutes, we were in the hills behind town. The entrance came up fast, but we had ritualized this maneuver to the point that we knew where to turn in the darkness. The back entrance to this planned community led to the California aqueduct, and upon crossing that threshold, we descended into the winding network of decrepit roads to find our usual spot. Trash lined the cracked asphalt from years of illegal dumping. There were couches with the cushions missing, broken box televisions, and miscellaneous scraps of plastic, but the majority of it was children’s clothing.
As the headlights illuminated the road next to a chain link fence, we turned onto a dirt path that was marked by the dark mass of a juniper bush in the night. “Home sweet home,” I said as I brought the green metal box to my lap. It was an ammunition box, .50 caliber, though I’d found it in my garage repurposed as a cigar box, then emptied. I asked my dad if I could have it, and as far as he knew afterward, it had disappeared. Little did he know how much the airtight container had aided me in my misadventures. Undoing the latch, I popped the lid open to invite a waft of smell into the car.
I turned to Johnny. “Remember what came before this?”
“The Ziploc bags. Dear God,” he remembered. “Those were such a pain to open. They did make it easy to sneak my shit out when I needed to drop them into that bush under my room, though.”
I replied, “There’s still a hole from where I dropped it all those times.”
We sat together as I fumbled with the instruments of our hobby.
“So,” I picked up, after a moment. “How is she?”
“She’s fine. More of the same,” he said, taking the object I had handed to him and bringing it to his lips.
I pressed further. He didn’t like talking about his mother, but it would be the last time I would see him for a while. “What’s her head like these days?”
“She remembers my name now, but she can’t remember much for longer than ten minutes. I can’t get her to eat anything solid. Today, I went into her room to try to get her up for the bathroom —
“Mijo, I want my ice cream.”
“No, mamá, we’ve got to get you up.”
“Mijo, please. My ice cream.”
“Mom, no. You had some today. You need to get up.”
“I started to pick her up and she started crying. She was crying like a child. She only acts like a child now. I had to carry her this time. Usually I can get her to walk nowadays. But she kept crying. I couldn’t take it. The move, all the documents, my dad, all of it. I just set her down in the hallway, called my sister, and locked myself in my room. I couldn’t take it.”
He paused to take a hit.
“My grandma had said she wasn’t coming with us to Sacramento earlier. She wants to stay with my dad, as if that bastard has ever done anything for her. As if the foreclosure wasn’t hard enough. I don’t know when I’m going to see her again, if I’m going to see her again. My dad found some back lot trailer to move into on the east side of town, so I guess she’s moving in there. I don’t care.”
He took another hit.
“But I really had to get my mom to eat. If her blood pressure drops, she’s in the hospital again. I went in with some rice and corn and tried to feed it to her. She wouldn’t fucking eat it. She just kept saying, ‘Mijo! My ice cream! My ice cream! Mijo!’” So, I guess I caved. We got a pint of one of those high protein ice creams from VONS. I swear I put so many crushed up iron pills into it. She seemed to like it, though. I guess I’ll try tomorrow.”
He was silent. His shoulders loosened into his seat. A pause fell between us.
“Damn,” I said, half regretting that I brought it up. “I’m sorry,” was the only response I could ever come up with.
We remained there, silent, passing our vice between us in the darkness.