Most of my stories are light-hearted, so to speak, I rarely write about the disasters that have made my life, (all, by the way, of my making). I have told the disaster tales at those funny meetings some of us go to. They’re called drunk logs whether the choice is alcohol or drugs or all the above. I have them. I tell of a few of them in my songs and one song I wrote is about my ex-wife, the one before the last one. She’s gone from this life now, and my picture of her is clear. I shared those young couple dreams with her. We had daughters and we had a house and jobs, and…stuff. We had friends and we had our favorite bars and drug dealers.

Our marriage was fiery from start to finish. We had incredible highs, we had blow out wars, and soon we had no reason to compel us to be a couple and all those dreams fell by the wayside. I left California in a chemically induced haze. And the haze was thick. I had tasted sobriety for a short time but was not ready, so my last run consumed me. At the end, I had people looking for me to do extreme harm, a broken heart, and a multitude of broken dreams. I had a guitar and some clothes and I had a 1969 BMW 2002 and together we set out for Arkansas where my dad had landed from his forays around the world.

I drove. And left Sacramento in the late evening, headed south down Highway 99. The plan was to get to I40 in S. California, that would guide me to Arkansas. I probably hadn’t been to sleep for days, I was in the throes of a serious crank runner. I had quit drinking so there was no balance I could achieve. I was spinning and I had a big bag. It was the reason there were people looking for me.

I stopped around Fresno to take a break, get a Coke and candy bar, and look at my map. I poured over that thing for a long time, and I found a short-cut, the first of a few shortcuts I would find. There was a road that looked like it would cut a bunch of miles and bypass Bakersfield where you had to drive through town. I didn’t want to drive through town. People could see me. So a way around that also cut miles was a great idea, so I found my way onto my first disastrous shortcut.

I got lost on little country roads, some sort of paved and some dirt. I spent hours driving, and the only thing I knew was where I needed to keep the sun to ensure I was heading in the right direction more or less. I wound up going through Bakersfield anyway and found the highway that would take me to I40 and east. I’m sure people saw me. It was full daytime and had been for hours. And the whole time I was doing more and more crank, doing lines, dumping quantities of it into the warm Cokes I had with me, and just eating it sometimes. I missed my turn going through Bakersfield and wound up driving to Victorville before I realized I was going the wrong way. By then it was getting late, late afternoon. Soon it was dark and I was headed across the desert finally going East.

When it was full on dark, I felt safe finally, and got off the freeway and found a little dirt road that climbed a hill and offered me a view of a desert full of lights that marked some huge chemical plant, I assumed it was the Borax Mine there. The lights were amazing for me and I stayed for a long time. I felt safe, finally. And the lights seemed to be alive and they didn’t threaten.

I tore myself away from my space travel watching the lights and drove across the desert. The highway was really bumpy, and as loaded down as my little Bimmer was it was hitting bottom often. As I drove I had a running conversation with myself about how I was going to find an auto parts place the next day and get some new shocks for the car and find a good shady spot and install them. I knew exactly how I was going to do it, picturing all the stuff in the trunk I would have to remove to do the back ones and planned the operation for the front ones as well. I’m sure I was talking out loud, and soon the pile of folded clothes I had on the passenger seat became my audience. I talked to the pile of clothes all the way across the desert.

By then I was thirty hours into my trip and I had traversed a total of maybe five hundred miles. I drove. In Needles, I ran out of drugs, gas, and gumption and found Mc-Donalds. I remember the parking lot because it had a steep driveway into it from the street. I got coffee and a burger. I choked down the burger and it was probably the first food I’d had except for candy bars and ice cream for days. I was sitting in their parking lot on a space journey in my head. I noticed when they closed the place down, all the lights went off, and the big sign turned off and the last guy came out, got in his car a drove away. I spaced more and drifted in and out of consciousness for more hours. I continued the conversation with my clothes regarding the shock absorber chore I needed to do the next day.

Then I halfway slept and was awakened by car noises in the parking lot. When I opened my eyes it was dawning and there was a couple of workers opening up the McDonalds. I waited until the drive-through was open and got more coffee and a breakfast sandwich and left. I felt uncomfortable and knew there was something I had to do, but I drove away, got on the freeway and headed East. And I drove. As I was passing into Arizona, I remembered I needed to stop and get some shocks for the car. All the way to Kingman, I was recalling my conversation the night before about the shock absorbers, and when I drove into town I realized I had left whoever I’d been talking to back at McDonald’s in Needles.

I turned around and drove back to Needles to pick up my companion. Looking at the map shows me that the distance from Needles to Kingman is seventy miles or so, and the whole way back I was hoping my companion was still there waiting for me. I got off the freeway at the McDonald’s exit and as I was driving up the driveway to the parking lot, I glanced at the passenger seat and realized I would have to move all my clothes for him to sit. Then I knew that there was no companion…other than my folded jeans and t-shirts.

I got back to Kingman in the afternoon, about 48 hours into my twenty-three hundred mile trip, and I had only driven about six hundred miles. I wasn’t making good time at all. I got shocks and found a shady spot at a rest stop and put shocks on my car. And continued on. I drove all night, I was still spinning at about a thousand miles an hour. I drove through Arizona, then New Mexico across the wide swath of desert where the overpasses and exits are few. I only stopped for gas and the next day I was approaching the outskirts of Albuquerque. It was quite a change for my senses. There were a lot of cars all of a sudden, many exits, many lanes, and signs everywhere. It confused me and again I felt afraid of everything, the drivers in the other cars, the huge trucks who passed me, and the ones I passed. And I kept reading the green signs following the route to Amarillo. For a long time those signs read Denver and Amarillo, presumably, there would be a division of routes somewhere.

I started noticing the signs were telling me Denver was four hundred miles, then three hundred miles, and they never said anything about Amarillo. I realized I was on the wrong road and had been for a long time, hours and hours.

I still had a few faux pas, short-cuts designed to cut time and distance that turned into dirt trails with boulders bigger than my car in the middle of the road, another missed exit in Amarillo for a time-consuming side trip, and a complete miscalculation of routes when I entered Arkansas. I wound up driving all the way across the state and back-tracking a hundred and fifty miles to get to my dad and my resting place.

By the time I found my dad and his house I’d been driving this trip for a solid seven-plus days, had never really been to sleep and was spinning still, but running out of gas. I slept long. I’m sure my dad figured out, I was at the end of some life road. I slept every day for hours for at least a week. I started to get clear. I started my Mountain View, Arkansas musical journey. And I got sober and clear. It was a long trip and the last seven days were a bitch. That was the end of my marriage, I had broken the bounds and realized, finally, the end of my crank days. And I stayed in Arkansas until I couldn’t stand being away from my daughters anymore and came back, not a new man, but a different man.

I wrote a song about all of this, and it pays a huge tribute to the powerful love in my life that was. It’s called Storm in Paradise, and it is specially dedicated to Stacey.