the road diverged

i was thinking about choices the other day. in life when we look back it's sometimes difficult to spot the intersections that moved us from one road to another. unlike film or books, our lives don't always arrange themselves in neat chapter headings of a purposeful narrative. more often it looks to us in the present (and even in memory) as if we were the subject of a sayles brothers documentary in which the camera is continually rolling and no one ever takes time to edit previous footage.
certainly as we grow older though the bigger events of life serve as stone mile markers on our journey through the game of life. college or career. relationships and marriage. the birth of a child. the death of a parent. those are the big ones. and yet how many thousands of choices along the way, seemingly unimportant end up on the cutting room floor of our minds? maybe it's because i'm a man, i don't know, but i have always associated the passing of different eras in my own life by the vehicles i owned at the time, and the symbolic meaning they had as they transported me through time.
it was early summer of 1992 and i found myself living in the spare bedroom of my mother and new stepfather. i had already been out. first living in san francisco and then a traveler on the roads of america. back to san francisco, and now through a series of events found myself homeless and living in a condo bedroom in the town of my youth. the town i had sworn off so recently. i was working part time at the local blockbuster video and my life was a pattern of waking late in the day, hanging out with those friends whose schedule matched my own, working the swing shift, then taking the requisite two videos home each night to watch late into the night.
i had no vehicle, so this meant i was dependent on whoever could shuttle me from place to place. that or i was wearing out shoe leather. the part time video job was certainly no great career choice, and at the promptings of my mom i went looking for something more constructive to occupy my days. the best i thing i could find was a temp job which would have me basically copying real-estate papers for a loan office as there was a refinance boom taking place that summer. the thought of putting a button up shirt and tie on each day and working under the mind numbing fluorescence was hardly appealing, but as i mentioned the proposition to my mom she encouraged me to do it anyway. actually, let me be more truthful. she basically put it to me that i had been living the slacker life and that i had better do something, even this menial temp job or i would further spiral into a life of meaninglessness illustrated by the image 45 year old men sitting next to their mothers on oprah who still lived in the spare bedroom. well, maybe it wasn't that dramatic, but she did challenge me to work through this assignment, and i took the challenge.
still with no vehicle i hoofed or hitched a ride to the bart train each morning and took the train up to the next to last northeastern most stop on the line. the office was a short walk and there each day i fulfilled my duties in the obligatory white shirt and tie. and on each break i ducked outside to the fresh air and sat in front of the obligatory office fountain and counted down the days and hours until it would be over. and as i counted down time i also counted up the dough i was making whose purpose would net me a vehicle. my older friend and mentor had agreed to sell me his little motorcycle for the tidy sum of $300 and promised to hold it until i had finished the temp assignment and gotten paid. and it was the promise of that two wheeled fantasy that kept me going those dreary weeks. finally the job came to an end. i had copied and assimilated every backlogged freddie-mac and fannie-mae form to satisfaction, and caught the overwhelmed loan staff up. and apparently i had done so satisfactorily, because just a short time later i received another assignment from the same temp agency.
this one sent me out on a 2 day inventory job for one of the newly opened tower record stores in dublin, calif. and this was right up my alley. a complete contrast to the office i had just come from, housed with mostly middle-aged ladies in frumpy attire and manner. tower was full of young hipsters. wild characters with amazing mythologies, many of which bore testament by the newly mass-popularized totems of tribalism, tattoos and piercings that adorned them. here again, my faithfulness to completing the task at hand, steadfastly urged on by that original challenge from my mother, i was asked to stay on as a permanent employee. a position that would ultimately begin to cobble for me a creative career. for as i started as just a cashier, i eventually worked my way into the position of "store artist" at a time when i needed an outlet for the burning desire to make each day something with my hands.


and as i went to supply myself with a vehicle to match my new career, i ended up passing on joe's little yamaha. i stayed on 4 wheels and purchased my girlfriend's white 69 squareback instead. (she having just upgraded from this temperamental beast to a more reliable and bright orange 72 squareback) i did so because i imagined the wagon would be a better long distance champ riding the dublin grade back and forth each day. it turned out though to be a constant question mark as it's cracked case meant slow cancer and had other quirks it displayed as well. it would often leave me stranded until i learned to gap the spark in the distributor, and the primitive automatic shifter sometimes failed to make its connection through the sensitive transmission plates. ultimately, less than a year later i ended up selling it to another artist named falco. (more on him some other time) and upgrading to a 79 water pumper - the scirocco.
but even as i had passed on the little yammy that joe kept in his garage all those years, my friend todd would end up purchasing it instead. and ultimately through my association with he and his brother jess, i found myself one sunny sunday morning riding this little bike through the beautiful back mountain roads of mt. hamilton with a bunch of other sub 100cc nuts and thinking about the road not taken and the one that got away.