Travel Places

We pulled off the ramp to business loop 10, one of those stretches of frontage road that claim to take you through the quaint downtowns of off-ramp America. That’s what we were looking for I suppose; off-the-main-road-America. Main Street America, that place you’ll hear about from time to time, without specifics. What would have once been roadside Main Street but now is off main freeway.

With all the talk of Main Street and Wall Street somewhere in the back of my mind I thought they both existed. It turns out only one is real. Main Street is a dream and not a very good one. A myth of broken windows and abandoned stores. Cracked asphalt sprouting weeds, long stretches of gas station flanked desolation. Sometimes a diner survives, dirty and neglected. Populated by dirty and neglected guests, too tattooed or toothless, too hapless to realize they don’t exist anymore than their dirty neglected diner. The fire in the kitchen is a cold fire like the fire in their eyes, on the verge of flickering out.

Then I thought; was I seeing the people in the next booth, the sallow man, the woman with her tattooed pendulous breasts or just my own reflection in the mirror of my dreams, the longed for Main Street? The longed for business loop that could take me from the freeway and transport me backward. Was I longing for something I missed or only something I wished I missed? Was it all that great in the first place, this Main Street? If it was something real I was missing how did it get away, get so dirty and neglected? Why were all the bright lights now shining on the franchised collapse of my past? Why were the lights so cold, fluorescent and lifeless, the smiles airless, the eyes all around me flat, lips not quite closed, not quite parted?

The reporters, with their perfect skin, flawless, tattoo-less, lit by lights that imitate the sun, don’t live here or even travel here. They speak of places they’ve never seen, places they’ve never been, reading words they never thought of from screens below the camera’s eye. Talking of obesity and cigarette smoking and sob story puppy dogs, one-off miracles and lotto winners, of salvation and millionaires. Are they less shabby, less lifeless, I wonder. Am I?