There’s this scene I remember. A young girl, all fresh and full of questions, in the back of a convertible. The wind is whipping through her hair. She’s sitting next to this older guy, a real road-worn bastard with a Jack Nicholson grin, the kind of man who looks like he’s been in a fistfight with the world and maybe, just maybe, won a few rounds.
She looks at him, with all the earnest, stupid sincerity of youth, and she asks the question they always ask. The one they think is so goddamn profound.
“What are you running away from?”
And he doesn’t give her a speech. He doesn’t give her a sob story about his miserable childhood or his ex-wife. He doesn’t give her a goddamn thing to chew on.
He just looks at her, his eyes full of a quiet, dangerous amusement, and he says, his voice all gravel and gasoline, “Turn your back to the front seat.”
And the girl… she gets it.
In that one moment, she understands the whole goddamn thing. Her face just opens up with this incredible smile, a smile of pure, uncut enlightenment. She understands that he’s not running from anything. The past is a ghost, a bad memory, a pile of ashes in the rearview mirror. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the road ahead. The only thing that matters is that you’re still moving.
And in that one, perfect, beautiful moment, they’re not an old man and a young girl. They’re just two people in a fast car, staring down the same long, empty highway, and for a second, they’re not alone.
That’s a hell of a thing.
Author’s Note:
The point of that story isn’t about some charming old bastard picking up a young girl. It’s not a love story. It’s a goddamn sermon. The only one that ever made any sense to me. The girl, she asks the question everyone with a soft head and a clean soul asks: “What are you running away from?”
It’s the question of the therapists, the preachers, the daytime television hosts. It’s the question of a world that’s obsessed with the past, with trauma, with digging up old bones and pretending that makes you clean. They want you to believe that you’re just a product of your own wreckage, a ghost chained to a history you can never escape. It’s a comfortable prison, that idea. It gives you an excuse for all your failures.
And the old man, he doesn’t play their game. He doesn’t give her a sob story about his miserable childhood or his ex-wife. He doesn’t hand her a key to his own private hell. He just gives her a command: “Turn your back to the front seat.”
That’s the whole goddamn point.
He’s telling her, and he’s telling you, that the past is a corpse. It’s a pile of ashes in the rearview mirror. You don’t stare at it. You don’t analyze it. You don’t try to make sense of it. You just keep driving. The only thing that’s real is the road ahead, the wind in your face, the next town, the next bottle, the next sunrise.
He’s not running from anything. He’s running towards everything.
And the girl’s smile at the end? That’s not the smile of a girl who’s charmed. That’s the smile of a person who has just been handed the key to her own goddamn cage. In that one moment, she gets it. She understands that her life doesn’t have to be a long, boring autopsy of her own pain. It can be a goddamn adventure.
What does it mean to me? To the author?
It’s the whole fucking story. It’s the reason I’m going to Argentina. It’s the reason I tell these stories. I’m not running from my shitty family, my failed marriage, or the man I used to be. I’m running towards the man I have left to become.
That scene is the whole goddamn gospel, boiled down to one perfect, beautiful, unsentimental line.
Turn your back to the front seat. And drive.
