The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Nineteen: Road Trip

My first year in college was over and I headed back to Connecticut. I never expected I would be saying this, but I was glad to be home. If Burlington was unbearably dull, at least I expected it to be unbearably dull, which made it better, in a way. I wasn’t an incredibly social person and it wasn’t the loneliness that bothered me. I could handle life on my own. But it was the disappointment and the idea that college should have been so much more that really got me down, even though I didn’t fully realize how hopelessly bad it had been until I got back home. And even if things got better, I thought, I only get four years of this and I had already utterly squandered one: I hadn’t made a friend, I hadn’t taken an interesting course, my grades were average, I hadn’t explored the city. I had done nothing, at exactly the time in your life when you’re supposed to be doing enough living to get you through the decades of cooling off in between graduation and death.

All of this might lead you to believe that I got home and did something crazy—like I went around crashing every party in northwest Connecticut, or I got a job or something. But I didn’t do anything like that, even though my parents were both very worried about me, I think. My dad was the one who tried to convince me to contribute something to society, while my mom stopped just short of telling me to go knock up some stranger in her concern that I was losing every semblance of a personality. I watched a lot of TV, read a few books.

One day, sometime around the middle of August, I told my parents I was going to get a haircut. I didn’t really need a haircut but I hadn’t stepped outside in four days and you need to start finding errands to run before you become a shut-in.

I think I must have known what I was doing, because I gassed up the car, even though I never gassed up the car unless it was running on fumes, and I usually avoided even this by just not driving for days at a time until somebody else took the car and had to fill it. And the haircut place was right down the road and the tank was three-quarters filled, so I must have known I was up to something.

I drove right past the Supercuts, even though I had made an appointment, and headed for the highway. Eventually, I made my way over to Route 8, heading towards Waterbury. I always enjoyed driving on this road more than anyplace else, because it goes right through the start of the Berkshires. It's a beautiful place, as far as roads go. Of course, when you're driving, you don't get a lot of time to enjoy the scenery, which I was only realizing for the first time, but I didn't really mind.

I just kept driving for a couple of hours. I switched from one highway to another every once in a while, with no real destination in mind and no real idea of how I was going to get home. After I made it into New York, I called my parents to tell them what I had done and then I kept going, all the way down into Pennsylvania eventually.

I took a break at a little rest stop, with a Roy Rogers and a Sbarro and a TCBY Yogurt. I decided to get myself some pizza, just to pass the time while I tried to figure out what I was doing way out here. I ordered a slice of cheese from a girl with curly red hair who told me she was going on break and asked if I'd like to sit with her. I said yes, of course, and we found a table in the corner.

The truck stop was completely empty besides the two of us. We chatted for a little bit and then I excused myself to go to the bathroom. When I was getting up, I noticed that a big guy with a shaved head had been watching us, looking really angry about it. The girl hadn't noticed.

I was washing my hands when the angry kid walked in and came straight for me. "You got something you want to tell me?" he asked. I shook my head. "You sure?"

He was wearing an old Whalers shirt, which I thought was a funny coincidence, so I said "I like your shirt." He hit me right in the mouth.

"I'm gonna fucking take you apart!" he screamed. I stumbled backwards on my heels and backed against the wall.

"Whoa whoa whoa," is all I said. "Whoa."

"You wanna beg me for forgiveness before I murder you, Scott?"

"Who's Scott?"

"Don't fuck with me. I know who you are and I finally caught you red-handed, you fuck."

"I think you've got the wrong guy," I said. He stared at me. In retrospect, he was probably considering it, because I was clearly scared out of my mind. I bet if I had just stood there and tried to calm him down he would have heard me out and I could have showed him my driver's license or something. Instead I panicked and grabbed the nearest thing to me and tried to use it as a weapon. The nearest thing to me was a paper towel dispenser, so I grabbed a few paper towels and threw him at his eyes and tried to run past him out the door. Boy did that ever piss him off.

He hit me in the mouth again, then grabbed my head and slammed it against the side of one of the stalls three or four times. I'm not sure why he didn't slam my head against the solid concrete wall if he really wanted to kill me. The side of the stall was pretty flimsy, not much more solid than plastic, so it could have been a lot worse.

He stood over me for a bit and I didn't move. I think he decided I was unconscious, because he should have left, but instead he pulled out a cell phone and called his Aunt and had a three or four minute conversation about his grandmother's birthday dinner. I kept playing dead until he hung up, washed his hands, blew his nose, washed his hands again, checked his face and hair in the mirror and left. Then I tried to get up and leave, but I found that I couldn't whether I wanted to or not, so I figured I'd gather my strength for a while and get up when I could, or wait until someone else to come in and have them help me.

A few hours later, I still couldn't move and no one had helped. There had been a guy in the bathroom at one point, but he just stepped over me. I moaned, but he just did his thing and left. He was singing some old Queen song, which made it immeasurably worse.

Finally, another few hours after that, I found that I could stand, with some effort. I got up and staggered back into the lobby. It was pretty late at night by this point. The girl and the kid who had pounded me were long gone. There was just a mother with two little kids in one corner and a lonely-looking guy in the middle of the room. I wanted to talk to somebody for some reason so I decided to say hello to him.

He was a beefy guy, probably 35 or 40 years old, with a big red beard. He asked me where I was headed and I told him Connecticut, even though I wasn’t really sure if I was ready to go home. I had been heading back northeast for a bit, but it wasn’t the first time and I hadn’t ruled out turning around again. For some reason, I really wanted to see Delaware. My entire life I had never met anyone from Delaware, even though it’s really not that far away from Connecticut, and I had my suspicions that it really existed. But the beating had somewhat tempered my adventurous spirit, so I figured now was as good a time as any to head back home.

Anyway, this guy was from New Jersey, and he told me that he was having a huge fight with his wife and he wasn’t sure if he would be able to go home that night, or even ever. He had been trying to patch things up, but she just hung up on him whenever he called.

“I’m lost,” he said. “I’ve made some mistakes, I won’t deny that, but I really want to change.”

“So why don’t you change?” I asked in between checking my mouth to make sure I still had all my teeth.

“It’s not that easy,” he told me. “How can I change if she won’t let me?"

“I don’t know,” I said, not really grasping that it was mostly a rhetorical question. The guy shrugged and offered to buy me a soda. I accepted.

He got a couple sodas at the Roy Rogers around the corner. He apologized for getting me a Coke, even though I had asked for orange soda. “They were out of orange,” he muttered, and he told me to drink, because I looked thirsty. I wasn’t really thirsty--just badly hurt--but I took a sip anyway.

“Take another sip,” he told me. I did, though I was getting a little suspicious. “Now take a big gulp,” and that’s when everything started getting a little fuzzy.

When I woke up, I was in my car, driving down the highway someplace. It didn’t look like Pennsylvania anymore, and it wasn’t Connecticut. I didn’t know how I got there or how long I had been driving or how I had managed to drive unconsciously without getting killed, and as I was trying to make sense of the gap in time, I remembered the guy in the rest stop and the soda.

Had I been drugged? It was too awful to consider. I quickly checked my manhood and everything appeared to be in order, so I breathed a sigh of relief. But why had this guy drugged me, and what had he done with me? I decided it didn’t really matter and pulled over at the first gas station I saw to get directions home.

(Years later, I would read a story about someone who matched this guy’s description, who apparently drugged lots of people but always lost the nerve to do anything once they were knocked out, and so he always just left them where they had been, sleeping. So I guess that’s what happened to me. It’s a horrible thing to say but I was a little disappointed when I read this, just because I had kind of fancied myself a victim after this whole experience and it was helpful in constructing excuses for all the stupid things I did for a while.)

It was a little before noon, and when I walked into the gas station, there was a teenager behind the counter, reading a magazine.

“I’m lost,” I told him. How do I get back to Connecticut?”

He shrugged. “Uh, I don't know. You could take an airplane, I guess.”

I was starting to worry. “Where am I?”

“This is a Citgo. Do you have a Citgo card?”

“No, I mean what state is this.”

He looked at me like he didn’t trust me, like he thought I was setting him up for a prank. “You’re in Nebraska.” And it was August 28nd, and I had to be back at school in three days.

I asked the kid for a quarter and called up my parents. My mom told me she was happy to hear from me and asked me how my vacation had been. I just said “good” and told her to pack my bags and meet me in Boston on the 31st.