6 Awesome And Epic Ways To Deal With California Traffic!

California is a wonderful place. It’s the home of improv comedy, the OJ Simpson trial, and the legendary Bruce Campbell. The only downside? Traffic. Listen up, because these are the best ways we could come up with to beat that traffic!

1. Let’s get this out of the way first. Get a Red Hot Chili Peppers album. Right now. We’re serious.

Grandma had it in her head that I was to be a truck driver. She considered this trip to be my career orientation. To her it was a school assignment, and I was graded on whether I came back with my idleness beaten out of me. Over dinner she’d talk about how I was born for driving trucks. “You always set your mind to concentrating on one thing and you don’t look back. That’s all being a truck driver is. Frankly it’s the best thing you have going for you. I won’t have you turn out to be a sonofabitch like your uncle.” She didn’t hate my uncle, she just liked calling him a sonofabitch.

Mostly I think she wanted this trip to scare some discipline into me, to terrify me into the righteous path, but I was looking forward to it a bit. I never saw what Grandpa did during the day. I only ever saw him on his porch.

“Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’ Clementine. You were lost and gone forever, oh my darlin’ Clementine.” Grandpa sang that from the start of the 58 all the way out to Tehachapi. He’d take a drag off a cigarette, sing that line and repeat with no intention of ever stopping. I don’t think he even realized he was doing it, but while I sat next to him, it was all I could think about. The way he sang was mournful, ragged, barely above a whisper. As the sun beat down and Grandpa sang, I kept wondering if he was secretly singing about some long-lost girlfriend back in Oklahoma.

2. Listen to podcasts. All of them!

That song sapped the giddiness right out of me. To 11 year old me, sitting in a big rig going to Tehachapi and pretending to sleep, it was suddenly the definitive statement on loss. Cigarette. Clementine. Cigarette. Clementine. Cigarette. Clementine. Suddenly half an hour goes by. It’s got to be some sort of coping mechanism, I figured. His way of remembering a time in his life none of us knew about. “This is privileged information, and I am his only relative who knows about it.”

Idleness is a demon. It deceives us into thinking we have grand ideas.

After what seemed like 5 hours to a kid with only the Hardy Boys for distraction but was probably closer to an hour, we pulled into a Texaco. Grandpa didn’t believe in gift giving, so everything had to be a proposition. “I figure you’ll get hungry waiting around for me today, so I got a proposition. You’re on guard duty. Watch my truck for me, shoot anybody who tries to get in it, and I’ll get us some Moon Pies.” I obliged. “Yessir, no problem at all,” I half-whispered. He paid the clerk and then looked at me and laughed. A deep smoker’s laugh. It was all gravel and bass and it made me ashamed of my own laugh: an innocent little high-pitched squeal. Grandpa continued. “The gun’s in the glove box. Kill ‘em dead. You’re working for these Moon Pies!”

This amused the clerk, who seemed to know Grandpa. “Well damn, you think that kid’ll shoot straight in a moment of panic? He’ll probably cap the guy in the knee. Just give a criminal more determination.” I smiled politely and I knew that would never happen and I wondered where the clerk lived. I hadn’t seen a house in an hour, and the only thing near that Texaco were some rolling sprinklers dotting the horizon. Everything else was just dust devils snaking through the fields.

3. Go buy a Bluetooth headset for your iPhone! Hurry!

We left Texaco and a bum asked Grandpa if he had any change. Grandpa didn’t even make eye contact as he muttered “maybe I’ll have some if you lay off that goddamn alcohol.” There was an anger in his voice I’d never heard before and never heard again. After we piled back in the truck, I took a deep breath and set to say something to dissipate the anger. So I asked him where the clerk lived. “Kindly by Tehachapi.” Then he lit a cigarette and we were done talking.

I was at that age where everything is a mystery to be solved. I wondered why Grandpa was so angry about the drunk man. Was his dad a drunk? I wondered if Clementine was the woman he loved before Grandma. “I bet she was, and I bet she died in a car wreck or something,” I stupidly thought to myself. I was enormously pleased with my explanation to this invented mystery, though it was all nine kinds of bullshit. More idleness.

It’s bewildering how empty the trucker routes get. As we chugged along toward the refinery, there wasn’t a damn thing to fixate on. I kept staring out the window, desperately hoping to find something I could talk to Grandma about later. Every once in awhile there’d be a discarded blouse or a shoe or a dead animal, but mostly it was just dust devils and a haze that stayed the same color all day. There weren’t even road signs. It was a highway that seemed to go nowhere. Certainly not anywhere that people lived. I kept wondering why I saw discarded blouses. What reason would a woman have for driving this road?

4. Remember Your ABC’s: Always. Bring. Coffee.

Soon enough we got to the refinery. It was called Witco. I knew this because Grandpa was always getting stuff with that name on it. Countless lighters, towels, coffee cups. Even an enormous box of pencils, though I never saw Grandpa use a pencil for any reason. I always wondered how he paid his taxes if he never wrote anything down. And it stands to reason—if you’ve ever opened a newspaper, something I don’t usually do and don’t recommend—that Witco was crooked. They’d made Oildale’s water undrinkable, the story told. “Good, they deserve it,” Grandpa once told me with a hearty chuckle.

He stopped the truck. “Alright, I gotta go figure out how the hell I’m gonna retire. Gun’s in the glovebox. Kill ‘em dead.”

I rolled the window down and opened my Hardy Boys book and I waited. (The book was something to do with a lighthouse and an abandoned Cadillac.) Minutes ticked over into hours. I had a spray bottle full of ice water I’d occasionally mist myself with. As it ran dry, I started to get worried. I hadn’t seen Grandpa in about 4 hours, and I’d finished the damn book.

5. Make it a competition. Pretend you’re racing the driver next to you!

It soon became necessary to piss, which worried me sick. The refinery scared me and I wasn’t about to go exploring it. To an 11 year old, it was an unending and impossible maze of corrugated sheet metal, the sort of place where goons and crippled cops get killed in bad movies. So, in a fit of anxiety, I prepared to embark on a journey to avoid pissing myself and dying in the Mojave Desert. I took the gun out of the glove box, stuck it in my back pocket, and jumped out of the truck.

It was about a half mile to the nearest bushes, which is not an impossible amount for a boy to walk, but I was looking over my shoulder the whole time to see if anybody was eyeing Grandpa’s rig. A couple times I stopped outright and started to turn around, thinking somebody was about to open it, which of course was wishful thinking.

After my relieved myself and ended my exile in the wilderness, I put the gun back in the glove box. I sat down and saw Grandpa returning, so I pretended to read my book, which I immediately ruined with sweat. Grandpa put the keys in the ignition. “They got me hauling a water truck down to Long Beach. Gonna spend six months driving back and forth to Hell-A.” Then he gave me a jacket with Witco and my name on the front, said it’d keep me warm in the winter, and we drove home.

6. Organic Snacks!

When we got back to Bakersfield, I snuck out to the shed and locked the door. I was overcome with an urge to cry so naturally I proceeded to do so. I couldn’t tell Grandma about how worried I was and how unqualified I felt for that line of work—neither could I lie with one goddamned ounce of conviction. I returned to the house after I’d gotten a sufficient amount of red out of my eyes. Grandma was asleep, and Grandpa was watching his favorite show: Huckleberry Hound. Grandpa laughed his deep smoker’s laugh as Huckleberry stumbled through a familiar song: “Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’ Clementine. You were lost and gone forever, oh my darlin’ Clementine.”