Mike D and the Exquisite Jade Lincoln

This is a monthly installment from Walking the East Coast, a serialized memoir. PREVIOUS CHAPTER. If you wanna, start from THE BEGINNING.

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For nearly two hundred days, I wore a turtle’s shell on my back. Its weight fluctuated as I added to and subtracted from its 55-liter belly. On certain days, I curled against its me-shaped curve under a sycamore umbrella. Jugglers tossed bowling pins, and the sun’s rays made cathedral windows of leaves, showering pictures on the grass. Champagne grapes and baguette from a market I’d stumbled on sweetened my lips and filled my belly. Other times, sweat cemented the shell to my back, and it turned stride to crawl, wrenching my shoulders and hips toward our mother and final destination. But wasn’t that the point? To bear what I chose to carry? To let go what I could bear to part with? To find guides, within and without, who would help me learn the difference?

In Hackettstown, New Jersey, on day eight, I dropped the shell to the sidewalk, plopped next to it, and watched the sun swallow whole the bus that had delivered me here. I was at once taken aback and not at all surprised at the dawning of a realization. Having reached the limits of public transportation, I would be left to my own devices to close the distance between here, wherever that was, and my intended destination. First, though, my rapidly warming rear conjured visions of eggs fried on pavement. Squinting, I spotted a sign up the road. “Rico Pan.”

A plate of pandeyuca and thick, greasy fries later, and I fished laptop from shell and pulled up MapQuest. What did we do before this brilliant new invention? I sketched a version of the map, highlighting the turns I’d need to make on a napkin. Ten miles. Doable, but. I took in the sun’s angle. Arriving before nightfall was a must. Before closing the laptop, I did one more quick search—just in case. The phone number of the only cab service in town joined the napkin map.

The foil-wrapped pan de queso and empanada I deposited in the top of the shell wouldn’t be nearly enough. Luckily, the grocery store was in the right direction. 

I soon found myself on another sidewalk, this time outside a grocer and surrounded by bounty. Novice at shell stuffing, I put the water in last, a jacket or shawl between smooshy stuff—bread and cheese, apples and oranges settling among carrots and broccoli, peanut butter and hummus. And below lay hiking boots and slinky heels, clothes and sleeping bag, books and camera. I wrestled the top closed, adjusting all straps to their maximum length, slipped my arms into shoulders, and rose to my feet with the help of a wall. 

The outskirts of town weren’t yet in my sights when I went for my notebook and the napkin tucked inside. Dialing, I dropped to the curb to wait.

Photo courtesy of Worldwide Vintage Auto.

I didn’t notice I was nodding to a rumbling thump until—sub-bass a full octave below the thrum of my heart—it drowned out my longing for two photographs I’d left in storage. Throbbing with the nearness of that beat, I looked up from my perch against shell to find a silver-grilled maw. Dainty headlamps on either side winked. Behind them stood 5,000 pounds of two-toned jade—minty vinyl up top, metallic sheen below.

The bass lowered, and a head with Red Delicious cheeks emerged from the driver’s window, beaming. “I’m ya taxi.”

I rose to my feet. “Oh yeah?” I scanned 233 inches of Lincoln Continental, its rear jutting cheekily beyond its 127.2-inch wheelbase, for a decal but came up empty. Eyebrows raised, I probably quipped something like, “The whole fleet this glamorous?”

He probably bounced with laughter, his eyes squeezed shut by rising Red Delicious, and said something like, “Ya lookin’ at the whole fleet.”

Even with him seated, I could tell he was one of those heavy-set guys who wear their shape, and a T-shirt and board shorts, like a tailored suit, thick of chest and tapering down but hints of softness and boyish blubber that would cling well into later years.

Shell first, I climbed aboard. The jade upholstery was velvety and cool.

Interior and preview photo courtesy of 440 Auto Sales.

When I gave my intended drop-off point, it was Apple Cheeks’s turn to tent his brows. “Ya sho?” he asked, doing a little at-your-service ripple with his hand in the rearview mirror when I nodded.

He fired up the 7.5 liter V8, and the Lincoln murmured low and gravelly. I felt the wind in my hair but didn’t yet notice the tires leaving the ground.

“I’m Mike D,” Apple Cheeks said, adding unnecessarily that he hailed from the city, meaning Newark.

I explained my roaming, how I fancied seeing the East Coast, that I could work so long as I could find an internet connection often enough to exchange manuscripts and notes with publishers and authors. Should I check out his hometown next?

Mike D and the Jade Lincoln roared as one, the seat beneath me vibrating with amusement. “Sho, if you wanna buy some fuckin’ coke. It’s like the heroin capital of the US.”

I told him I’d just come from Baltimore but not about the woman with eyes that looked through me, pulling me, turtle shell and all, inside her for a nanosecond. I didn’t wonder out loud, If opiate was a magic carpet ride for the soul, what must it be like to topple off?

The photos had stopped coming two years earlier. The adoptive parents had already gone beyond our arrangement; they were to send updates till she was five. She was nine, I think, in the photo I was yearning for. I had no right to complain of the instability the gap left in me—to say that not knowing how she was changing pushed me to the edge, that sometimes the realization anything could happen and I’d be none the wiser was a fist slamming me into the abyss. I had no rights.

“I’m tellin’ ya,” Mike D was saying, almost as a point of pride. “Baltimore’s bad, but they got nothin’ on Newark.”

Mike D lived in an apartment abutting a nudist resort on the outskirts of town. The resort wasn’t his thing, but people seemed to dig it. Oh, and Thursday nights. That was when the clubs in town would be going off. Not like the city, mind you, but for sure better than you’d think. I could find a place in town to stay, ya know, instead.

I shook my head. Maybe after.

Mike D had traveled once himself from city to city, mostly East Coast. He’d gone west and stayed in San Diego for a while though. He liked to help out travelers.

It was when he told me, his voice becoming trance-like, I was far-out, New Agey, a modern-day he-didn’t-know-what that I noticed the crowns of pignut hickory, chestnut oak, and black birch below us. A hawk I’d meet again glided by with a curved-beak nod, sun-gilded tips of vermillion tail feathers splayed.

Mike D was chanting in Jersey speak now. “You go out in search a Wi-Fi”—the incantation charmed jade into pulsing, psychedelic glow—“so you can go out in search a everything else.”

The cobbled song of a gray catbird—DJ of the forest, remixing borrowed tunes—swirled in pine-scented air. Rising from farther below, worms whispered of loamy refuge.

I leaned my head back to listen for wisdom beneath needle-covered floor. Above me appeared my two photos. A girl, silky carob hair framing dark eyes like light, mischief tugging the corner of her lip, is caught mid-reach toward a pond of koi and lily pads and meets the camera with defiance. Next to her, a young woman, cornflower locks flying, upturned face in rapture, sways in the hazy glow of an overhead light to Stone Temple Pilot’s “Plush.” The first, one of the last photos sent to me. The second, among the last I took before a turn on a dark road, a truck in the opposite direction, took the dancing woman. It wasn’t words that came to me but, rather, a message in vibrations: The girl would find me one day. The dancer would always live within me. 

I didn’t feel us land, only opened my eyes to see we were back on solid ground. 

Mike D pointed to the white on brown sign announcing Jenny Jump State Park, a small corner of the Appalachian Trail. “Ya sure ya good here?” he asked, eyeing my bulging shell. “I mean that bag’s big and all, but how much food can you have in there?”

I had boarded a bus in Charm City as dawn caressed the sky creamy, had seen the Big Apple’s skyline at noon. Shouldering my shell with only a tiny groan, I stepped out and breathed deeply. “I’m good.” I was. Smiling, I pressed the strip of paper with his cell number into my notebook, said I’d probably call in a week or so but not to worry if I didn’t, and headed toward the ranger station to see about a bear box.

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Note: I’ve broken my own rule on changing the names of people I can’t reach out to to be sure they’re cool with being in an essay. But I met Mike D and his Lincoln before social media took off, and though we’d meet up later on this trek, we didn’t stay in touch. I’d love to check in with him after all these years. It’s not much to go on, but if anyone knows a Mike D from Newark by way of Greece (he was first generation), who once drove a green Lincoln Continental as a cab in Hackettstown and lived in an apartment near a nudist resort, put him in touch with me, will ya?

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