I spoke about it quite recently, but in Spalding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia," he speaks about always striving to find the defining moment of every experience. The story below may have been one such moment of my Thanksgiving break out in Quogue, however strange.
Late in the day on Friday afternoon, I went out for an autumnal stroll with my little ones, Charlotte (age 7) and Oliver (age 5). The kids were happily walking through piles of leaves while I soaked up the crisp fall afternoon. I was even carrying a walking stick, for crying out loud. In any case, the seasonal splendor came to a sudden halt, however, when little Charlotte took a tumble on the pavement. She'd been lost in whatever little narrative she'd constructed with her little brother and wasn't watching her step. After that tell-tale pause, Charlotte let out an anguished cry that probably shook several of our neighbors out of their tryptophan-addled naps. I rushed over and scooped her up (Charlotte's a little bit of a delicate flower and big on histrionics) and managed to calm her down a little. We turned around and went back home, the silence punctuated by Charlotte's little whimpers.
We got back to my mom's by around 5pm, when the dark falls like a heavy quilt, blanketing everything in pitch black. We walked inside and Charlotte suddenly noticed that her knee was bleeding through her jeans and immediately the water works resumed in force. Peggy and my mother attended to her, but we realized that we were fresh out of Neosporin. As such, I was summarily dispatched to the nearest pharmacy in Westhampton Beach.
I climbed into the car and headed out. It being a suitably dark and chilly evening, I fired up some Joy Division on the car stereo (I always keep a clutch of CD's in my mom's crappy car). The drive to Westhampton, however, was like something out of a David Lynch film. It was only about 5:15 pm, but the darkness was so impenetrable that I really needed the brights on to see where the hell I was going. Moreover, the wasn't another soul on the road at all, nor seemingly any lights on in any of the houses I was passing. It was as if everyone had dropped their silverware immediately after Thanksgiving dinner and cleared out with all haste. I tried to stave off the encroaching sense of chilly isolation by crooning along with ol' doomy Ian Curtis, moaning balefully from the car stereo, turned up to an unhealthily assertive volume.
I screeched into the Rite Aid lot and parked sloppily, convinced the store was about to shut its doors in the thickening gloom of the night. I picked up some Neosporin and a box of Mickey Mouse band-aids, paid and split. Mission accomplished.
I hopped back into the car and pulled out. As I turned onto Beach Lane and was cruising towards the bridge, I spotted something strange up ahead. On the side of the road was a crumpled heap of something. As I approached, I thought it might be a person. I stopped the car, the motor still running, and got out to investigate. Curled up on the side of the road, just shy of the grass was a large deer lying in a slowly widening pool of blood, presumably freshly clipped by a speeding car ... although I hadn't seen another car on the road for ages.
Sufficiently creeped out, I turned to get back into the car ... half expecting a robustly-antlered buck to come charging at me out of the darkness, seeking vengeance.
The entire time, the song below was booming out of the car. I doubt I'll ever hear it the same way again.
I got back in the car, and sped home through the dark.
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