50X30: Misadventures in Every State Before I Turned Post-Young

By Peter Lawrence Kane

Fueled by an insuperable lust for life and earnings from three game shows, Peter Lawrence Kane sought to realize his life-long goal: getting to all fifty states before his thirtieth birthday. This is the hilarious account of the bizarre (mis-)adventures that befell a self-described "gay nerd" as he moved around the country, making out in national parks, sneaking his dog into motels and falling in love with kitsch roadside Americana. Torn by the desire to complete the quest and the need to earn a living, Kane can't resist the allure of the road even if it means turning into his own worst enemy. What else are your twenties about?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Lawrence Kane
• Release date: Mar 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301277650

Peter Lawrence Kane

Peter Lawrence Kane's work has appeared on MSN, The Bold Italic and SF Weekly, among other places. "50x30: Misadventures in Every State Before I Turned Post-Young" is his first book. Born in New York, he lives in San Francisco.

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50X30

Misadventures in Every State Before I Turned Post-Young

By Peter Lawrence Kane

Copyright 2013 Peter Lawrence Kane

Smashwords Edition

Cover Design: Scott Sosebee

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For Paul

Table of Contents

i

NY + NJ + CT + PA + MA+ NH

FL

IL + AZ

DE + MD + VA + DC

OH + WV

VT + NH + ME

CA

TN + KY

RI

GA + AL

NV

IN

MO + OK

TX

IA + KS

AR

Interim I

WA + OR

Interim II

ii

Interim III

MI

WI

MN

ND

SD

WY

NE

CO

UT

ID

MT

Interim IV

LA

NM

AK

SC + NC

HI

MS

The 51st State

i. the last straw that broke the camel’s back

New York + New Jersey + Connecticut + Pennsylvania + Massachusetts + New Hampshire

I was born on March 9, 1981, a Monday, the day that Dan Rather took over from Walter Cronkite at the helm of CBS Evening News, the day the Reagan Administration re-categorized ketchup as a vegetable to evade school lunch nutritional requirements, the day that principal photography began on Blade Runner. If you were also born in 1981, you know that it was a very cool year to have been born in, because we got to graduate high school in 1999 (among other things). Very cool. In October of the year of my birth, I fucked Debbie Harry in a men’s room at Max’s Kansas City during the Pluton and the Humanoids concert, age nine-and-a-half months.

Among my earliest memories is receiving a puzzle map of the United States, the kind where when you removed a state, it revealed the capital beneath it. Utah was yellow, New England was fused into one piece and Wyoming and Colorado could almost be swapped. My grandfather assured me that although Texas (the most beguilingly shaped state) wasn’t dotted with little white upside-down Vs to signify mountains, they were there and he had seen them. I was probably four. For years afterward, relatives and neighbors would quiz me on state capitals and marvel that I actually knew them—which doesn’t seem all that strange to me now. It seems weirder for a small boy to display such an interest in the first place than to commit fifty names to memory after obsessing over the subject long enough. Around 2006, when it was especially trendy, I fretted that I had Asberger’s Syndrome and would cite this memory as evidence. I have obsessive tendencies and I’m uncoordinated. But I’m too much of a Chatty Cathy to be anything but the world’s highest-functioning Asberger patient, and my total lack of athletic prowess can be chalked up to being a huge fag. In any case, Asberger’s went out and compulsive hoarding was in.

I had a very ordinary suburban upbringing, utterly without trauma. My parents are still married and living in the house I grew up in, in Williston Park, New York, a middle-class Catholic town that was super-white then but now has a Korean grocery store where you can buy frozen eel. In Williston Park, some of the children are below average, and all the surfaces are sticky. It’s about as far from salt water as you can get on Long Island and even though the name sounds fancy, the houses are packed tightly together and there is no actual park. We grew up on the corner, with no backyard because the carport for the house on the adjacent block was immediately behind us. Nobody especially famous is from Williston Park, although the priest who administered First Communion to me would later show up on the front page of The New York Times for having molested dozens of children. He never touched me, though, even though I was polite and well-spoken and bad at sports.

Like Lisa Simpson, I have a tendency towards know-it-all-ism. I went through a God, Mom, you’re so embarrassing. Donatello’s the purple one! phase; a No, Dad, fluorite’s a four on the Mohs scale; apatite’s five phase; a period when I got a digital watch with world time and asked all adults if they wanted to know the hour in Moscow or Bangkok; and a long bout of fascination with sharks (and marine biology in general), during which I filed information about the different species on index cards, telling everyone I wanted to study at the University of Hawai’i. Like every kid, I loved staying home from school just to watch The Price Is Right, but what I liked even more was watching the Weather Channel during summer vacation—especially the Tropical Update hurricane forecasts at fifty minutes after the hour.

When we had to do a report on a state in the third grade, I picked Hawai’i, possibly because no one else thought of it first, floating there adjacent to Alaska off the southwest coast of Arizona. What a coup. There was a girl in my class who visited relatives in Kentucky, which was farther away than I’d ever been, so naturally I pummeled her with questions about what people did there, and was the grass really blue, while the girl who had to write her report on Kentucky probably started crying. My obsession with states expanded to license plates, too. When we drove any significant distance—to continental North America, say—I kept track of them in one of those little books, which soon filled up with hash marks like the walls of a political prisoner’s cell. New Hampshire was the sexiest license plate because of Live Free Or Die. The cadence of that phrase is awesome, and I could not have been more excited when, while visiting my mother’s childhood friend in North Andover, Massachusetts, we drove into the Granite State to buy tax-free Buster Browns.

I love the smell of fresh asphalt, and of fish markets, harbors and low tide. I have a pathological revulsion towards mayonnaise. My only fear is roller coasters, but it’s more accurate to say that I find the sensation so incredibly uncomfortable that what I’m really afraid of is being the guy who puked on the roller coaster. The first cassettes I ever bought were REM’s Out of Time and C+C Music Factory’s Gonna Make You Sweat. The first concert I ever went to without adult supervision was Green Day, at the Nassau Coliseum, in 1995, but it was a bigger deal to take the train into Manhattan on a week night in 1996, to see Weezer at Roseland. When I got to see Saturday Night Live, the host was Drew Barrymore and the musical guest was Garbage. In fifth grade, I won the spelling and geography bees. My favorite Wikipedia page is the list of optical phenomena, and my favorite onscreen death is in Sphere when Queen Latifah is attacked by phantom jellyfish that Samuel L. Jackson inadvertently manifested because he went in the sphere.

I have a friend in her late twenties who’s lived her entire life without ever leaving California, so it’s easy to forget that crossing state lines isn’t entirely insignificant—even where the states are comparatively tiny. We had relatives in New Jersey and Connecticut the way everyone on Long Island does, and drove once to Sesame Place in Pennsylvania. That had to be 1986 or ’87, in our 1973 orange Volvo station wagon. The AC crapped out as my mother scrolled the dial for a radio signal, which got all mixed up in my mind with the Emergency Broadcast System and the staticky emptiness that would result from a Soviet attack. These kinds of worries still found a voice then, filtering down through the last gasps of the Cold War.

Assuming I remember this correctly, the mad wish to get to every state hardened into a goal on my twentieth birthday, a loud, drunken moment that has refracted through the intervening decade with dueling twinges of anxiety and satisfaction over its achievement. I may or may not have been standing on a wobbly chair in my dorm at N.Y.U., lifting a Solo cup full of bottom-shelf bourbon high into a tangle of Christmas lights. My friends were making fun of me for being obsessed with geography yet relatively poorly traveled. I protested: we’d never gone on road trips as a family. In spite of growing up on an island, my mother hates bridges—planes, too. I’m as aware now as I was then that even two visits to Disneyworld by age eighteen plotted my life experience somewhere in the upper half of privilege, if you graphed out the dreams and opportunities of all Americans. In any case, I assigned myself the new task of getting to all fifty states within ten years’ time. All I remember about the rest of the night is feeling popular because of the turnout, and then throwing up on my glasses and my friend Rachel fishing them out of the toilet for me. What a great birthday that was.

When I slurred that intoxicated promise, a college sophomore balanced precariously on a cheap chair ten floors above the No Man’s Land that separated Chinatown from Tribeca from the governmental buildings to the south, it was March 9, 2001, and I had been to my seventeenth state (California) only a month prior—and lost my virginity only three months before that. Out the window was a courthouse built in Art Deco’s most monstrous and fascist vein, looming like a judicial ziggurat. Gas cost barely more than a dollar. The Twin Towers stood blocks away. I was at the dawn of my twenties, about to go nova, and the world crackled audibly with possibility.

Over time, the Fifty by Thirty vow oscillated between humor and seriousness. It was always do-able, but life has a way of getting in the way of even the sturdiest ambitions and I have a way of being life’s enabler. There were a few years, graduate school mostly, when I didn’t really go anywhere, and I would doodle on the New York Times weather map, marking the borders of the states I’d already been to, dreaming of the eventuality of a road trip, of South Dakota, and rolling my eyes at myself whenever the subject came up. Self-effacement was the goal’s public face, because I was always deadly serious.

There’s really only one way to do it: a lot of driving. Arguably, the transcontinental road trip is the quintessential postwar social institution in the United States, encompassing the chief national characteristic—restlessness—and its social-science partners, mobility and demographic change. The U.S. being one of very few large countries with any linguistic unity, a road trip exposes you to the unparalleled variety of topography and climate in central North America without the logistical problems you might encounter elsewhere. Even in an age of homogeneity, with regionalism under full assault from all sides, a road trip forces you to think twice about your received notions, especially those drilled into one’s brain by provincial people masquerading as cosmopolitans. And New York might be the most parochial place in the world.

Nothing is more nauseating than listening to New Yorkers pretend to be sheepish about their disdain for the vast swaths of America they would never visit in a million years. (In the case of people who move to New York in their twenties, fall in love with it and over-assimilate, they exhibit a sort of zeal of the converted that’s even more repellent). All too many New Yorkers tut-tut about what’s the matter with Kansas yet shudder at the thought of ever going there, and this has consequences for both national politics and how interesting you are as a person. Rather than subjecting yourself to a Scientology e-meter to weed out these engrams from your reactive mind, it’s better to see the country. You don’t have to be Walt Whitman, declaiming paeans to the dynamic heartland, to appreciate that there are worthwhile things to see beyond Twelfth Avenue, but if you live and die by that myopic Sol Steinberg New Yorker cover, you need to go for a drive. A true cosmopolitan is equally at home anywhere—and America is amazing.

America is amazing. I’m a proponent of road trips because I like them. I like driving seven hours without stopping and balancing spontaneity against a set itinerary. I like sleeping outside and I don’t mind going three days without a shower. I have a good sense of direction and I can handle minor setbacks. At the same time, I’m a proponent of road trips because I can be. There’s no disguising the class privilege (however garden-variety) of visiting every state, flying to Alaska and such, but this was my goal and I fucking did it.

I like being the only white person in a dim sum restaurant and ordering the most baroque item on the cart. I get very excited about the census. Once, I urinated next to LL Cool J at Benihana. For all their influence on me, The Simpsons and The Golden Girls tie for second place after Roseanne. I wish I had it in me to be an industrial designer. My favorite Beatles album is Revolver. And I have never, not even once in my life, taken a drag off of a cigarette.

Florida

The Kanes never went on any of the grueling historical-familial treks most people profess to loathe but secretly relish, but I was nine when we made the hajj to Disneyworld. That was 1990. The photos of me at Sea World reveal a bowl cut that takes up half my cranium, big double-bridged glasses and a T-shirt that advertised a commercial bank. My brothers loved the Indiana Jones show at MGM but I was in heaven petting stingray underbellies at SeaWorld and getting up at sunrise to walk through the Sonesta Resort, staring at such wonders as outdoor hot tubs and the little lizards that scampered into the scrub and the Florida license plates that proclaim which county the car’s from. Such a little asthmatic homo I was. 1990 might have been the summer when I read the entire Little House on the Prairie series.

My mother dressed me up for my first plane trip alone, visiting relatives in Jacksonville in 1994, and we all flew down to Orlando again in 1998 after deliberating where to vacation for our last summer together before I started college. (Where should we go? my parents asked. Yellowstone! I said. Hawai’i! Isle Royale! Anywhere but Florida!). I’ve only been back once, to visit my cousin Barbara in Fort Lauderdale in 2006 and I’ll feel a petty irritation the day it overtakes New York in population. After Oklahoma, it’s probably my least-favorite state. As of the distant future, the largest American city I will never have been to might be Tampa.

Florida was pretty much the only state I ever saw for the first nine-tenths of the nineties, with some near-misses here and there. Visiting my father’s childhood best friend on snowy Scroon Lake in upstate New York, we could see over the ridgeline to Vermont, tragically unattainable in the east. When my friend Tim’s Civil War buff father took him and me and our other friend, also named Pete, on a weekend trip to Gettysburg we passed tantalizingly close to Maryland while driving from a battlefield to some eternal flame. We spent an entire weekend listening to Simon & Garfunkel, giggling from the burden of reverent silence at the historic sites and quoting My Cousin Vinny. (Guess who nailed Marisa Tomei’s anti-hunting rant). I was the Screech to their Zack and Slater, but Pete and Tim and I have stayed friends for over twenty-five years, which is particularly impressive given my trajectory and all the people I’ve come to loathe in the interim.

Illinois + Arizona

I went to all-boys Catholic school, which really sucks when you are gay. The entire hierarchy is based on athletics, and anything really interesting to sensitive boys gets downplayed, because a Catholic education is not a liberal arts education, and creativity and critical thinking skills are encouraged only inasmuch as college admissions require them. The entire point of St. Lord of the Flies High School was to mold nominally devout Catholic all-stars, tomorrow’s One Percent. Institutions designed explicitly to perpetuate male power are grotesque, and on top of that, it’s supremely irresponsible to eject four hundred young men out in the world each year without any sex ed. I was just enough of a smartass to avoid getting beaten up, but I hated those four years of utter terror, circling days on the school calendar when I had gym class and calculating the ideal mix of snow days and fake illnesses to minimize the number of times I would be picked last in basketball, but I joined the band and the speech and debate team and eventually became pretty good at the latter.

If one is the least bit familiar with the weird and hermetic universe that is forensics, one will know much when I say that I competed in Lincoln-Douglas debate and extemporaneous speech. Since college, I’ve done an admirable job of glamouring people into thinking I’m sort of cool—or, at least, I’ve hovered at the periphery of the beautiful people just enough to fake it—but deep down I’ll always be an extemper, armed with mildly interesting arcana about Madagascar and citing sources in my head when political discussions arise. I would go on to compete for eight years in that odd hybrid of competition and performance, through my undergraduate tenure at N.Y.U., ultimately returning to co-coach the team for another two years while getting my M.A., and working with the girl who became a national champion twice over.

So it was through being such a hardcore extemper that I got to Illinois and Arizona by qualifying for the two national tournaments in the spring of 1999. In Chicago over Memorial Day weekend, even though we were seniors and had already technically finished high school, we behaved ourselves, all twenty-five of us, with only four Marianist brothers in charge. We went to the then-Sears Tower and to Ed Debevic’s and Navy Pier, taking lots of pictures. Dressed like George Michael Bluth, I put my awkward arms around the waists of the girls from Sacred Heart, adolescent tentativeness compounded by my total lack of a boner. I remember seeing Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana from the Sears Tower observation deck, and plotting how to break away from the group and get there. (That would take nine years and two more trips to Chicago). But I did get to visit a high school in suburban Wilmette, Illinois, because speech and debate is just that thrilling.

The other national tournament is much smaller and tougher to qualify for; there were only three of us plus one Marianist brother as a chaperone-coach. I performed unimpressively at each, failing to break finals and being told to watch my accent on the score sheet to the final speech of my high school career. Wearing dress clothes in Phoenix in June and walking into air-conditioned classrooms to orate creates instant congestion unfavorable to smooth delivery. It didn’t take much code-breaking prowess for the judges to determine where the competitors came from, and since I sounded nasal, they chalked that up to unexamined Lawnguyland speech patterns.

Far better was the drive across Arizona, where the speed limit was seventy on the highway and snow crowned Humphreys Peak on the longest day of the year as it was 110 in Phoenix. In the Superstition Mountains, we got out to inspect six-foot tall yellow flowers with long leaf-less stems that looked straight out of Dr. Seuss. The four of us drove us to the Grand