Road Trip
Paul’s father had passed away earlier this year so he had been kind of out of sorts, even for him. His father was a heavy drinker and when his liver started failing him, he was told he needed to stop drinking. He had done well for a while, but then he went back to drinking with a vengeance. After that he went down quickly. Paul was mad at him. To Paul, his father committed suicide. To everyone else he was an alcoholic who let the booze get the better of him. Paul saw what alcohol did to his father and hardly drank because of it.
Nonetheless, he had unresolved issues with his father. He felt like he and his father could never connect. It seemed like they didn’t have any of the same interests. The drinking was one. While Paul didn’t drink, the rest of us did, and used to drink with him to the wee hours of the morning while he cooked things for us on the BBQ. He took Paul deep sea fishing when Paul was younger, one of Paul’s fathers favorite past times. Unfortunately the waves that day were rough and to Paul, the ship almost capsized once or twice and he became deathly afraid of being out on the water. He never felt he could tell his father about this fear because his father either would tease him about it or tell him to ‘get over it’. So his father just thought he didn’t like fishing. Anyway… unresolved issues, and that’s just what I know.
I also knew Paul needed to get away for a little while. The last time he went away was to see a girl we knew from High School named Val. It didn’t end well. Paul really liked her and arranged for her to live in his parent’s basement briefly when she had problems at home. At one of the parties, Matt hooked up with her and that crushed Paul. The rest of us just teased Matt because to us, she always looked like a boy. Sometime after that she ended up moving down to North Carolina.
Paul went down to visit her. I don’t know what he expected to happen. Well I did, but it wasn’t going to happen. When he got back he informed us that Val was a lesbian to no shock to any of us. What was shocking was how Paul found out. While she was at work, he read her diary and found out she had a girlfriend and then had the audacity to confront her about it. Paul was more shocked that no one was surprised about her being a lesbian than us being furious with him for reading her journal.
Anyway, now here we were. He wanted to go on a road trip and I agreed to go with him. He had gone south so we decided to go west. We had no real plan. We just hopped in his car and left. By the time we got to Ohio I remembered that Kimmy, a girl I had met through our friend Brooke was going to school out here in Ohio. Kimmy and I hit it off really well and had started up an E-Mail correspondence ever since. On the road, I couldn’t E-mail her, so we got her number through information and announced we were coming, much to her surprise! Kimmy is such a sweetheart! She was in the midst of a very bad cold/flu and had a test she needed to study for but was most hospitable nonetheless. After spending the night at her place we headed north and spent the day in Chicago. We went to the Zoo, Wrigley Field and other touristy locations. The next day we headed back towards Cleveland for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Something I really wanted to see. Paul had wanted to keep going west, but I had my fill of “Paul Time”.
Wrigley Field Paul taking pictures
After dinner at the Hard Cock Café in Cleveland, Paul was talking about visiting the Football Hall of Fame south in Canton, Ohio. I looked at my watch and said. If we leave now, we could be back home by morning. And so we did. We drove throughout the night getting back home at the crack of dawn.