We couldn't have fit any more in if we tried

It was a Ford Econoline van, brown, '77, the year that punk broke...but this was '86, punk was dead, jokes were in, barely.

My father asked, "Can you get it in writing?!"

We welded the sliding door shut in upstate New York, Niagara or Buffalo, maybe Corning. The engine blew outside Greenfield, Indiana. The differential failed in Benton Harbor. Radio stolen in Joliet Illinois. Windshield smashed repeatedly about the head, neck and shoulders.

A brown van need only be brown and a van to draw suspicion...we were pulled over at least once every 6 days.

We logged mile after mile, hour after hour, endlessly for years at a time. We were not on the road, we were in the road. There was no end in site. Homer talked to us in our sleep. We lived in shadow, as ghosts of ghosts. No one wrote to us, no one could call us. We were living, breathing cartoon characters, swerving the soggy states like ding dongs.

New shoes and pool halls made me happy out there.