In the summer of 2012, I helped a close friend (who was also named Sam) move from Pasadena, California to Atlanta, Georgia. Instead of taking a normal route along Interstate 10, Sam, drawn in by the search for a rare German pastry called baumkuchen, insisted on taking a circuitous route that ultimately sprawled across the Great Basin and the Midwest and down the Appalachians and Atlantic Coast. My recollections from the time, lightly edited, are hereby offered for your entertainment.
Before going on our trip, Sam had gone apartment hunting in Atlanta before settling on a small abode in Midotwn that he described as “neither Lynchian nor Fellinian, but certainly Steve Buscemian.” It was to this place that we drove.
Despite avoiding anywhere of note besides Macon, the highway was crammed with billboards to a degree unmatched on the entire trip. There seemed to be one every ten feet, and they were invariably covered with schlocky advertisements for tractor repair or the Second Coming. To take our mind off this ugliness, and get into the Georgia spirit, I put on an episode of This American Life dedicated entirely to the state. They sent staffers, contributors, and guest speakers all around Georgia, looking for something interesting to report on. The episode was two years old, and I wondered why they hadn’t done an episode like that for other states. If they had, we’d have been listening to them each time we arrived somewhere new, and it would have spared us the next episode, which was about a man who had been taken as a child from a massacre in Central America by one of the soldiers who committed the atrocities.
Sam was right about the arpartment. Although the building was brand new, the unit was unquestionably Steve Buscemian. The corridors of the building looked dispiritingly like those of the hotel in Barton Fink. “I will show you the life of the mind!” I yelled as we dragged Sam’s boxes into the apartment.
“You probably shouldn’t yell,” he said.
Day Thirteen
The next day, we went to IKEA, a place Sam found infinitely more interesting than I did. There was a sale on, and as a result the massive complex was packed like a sardine can. At one point I snuck off to find lunch, but instead fell asleep in the cafeteria.
I told this to Sam. “How could you fall asleep here? This place is amazing! I got my bed and it has a name: Hemnes!”
“Of course it’s amazing to you,” I said. “You’re the one shopping.”
I have no memory of the afternoon, but was told we went to Best Buy. With a brand new television in tow, we spent the stifling days lying about, eating Krystal Hamburgers and failing to see what all the fuss was about, drinking, flipping back and forth between the Olympics and a British game show called Would I Lie to You?
At this particular moment it was the Olympics. Men’s beach volleyball, and Sam was thrilled because Latvia was winning. He’d been talking about this for a few days.
“Latvia,” he explained to me, “must be one of the best countries in the world, because their beach volleyball team are the only people in the Olympics who look like they are having fun.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Look at the Americans,” he said.
Latvia was facing the United States, and while I wasn’t politically prepared to root against my own country, I saw what he was talking about. The Americans looked utterly miserable. They even high-fived listlessly, as if being forced at gunpoint. Meanwhile, the Latvians looked thrilled just to be there, like Christoph Waltz does whenever he appears in public.
“Do you remember that episode of Seinfeld, where George joins the Latvian Orthodox Church?” I asked. Of course, he did.
“Well, the writers didn’t realize that Latvian Orthodox was a real religion. They thought they’d made it up. But the Latvians didn’t get pissed. They wrote the Seinfeld writers a letter thanking them for bringing attention to them.”
Team Latvia was later awarded the Bronze medal.
Day Fifteen
Going out in Atlanta was never easy. The apartment was on Ponce de Leon, near Little Five Points, the hipster section of Atlanta, which would have been within walking distance were it not Atlanta in August. Even with the heat and humidity, we were completely unprepared for the sudden bouts of torrential rain that always seemed to occur whenever we had somewhere to be.
Near Sam’s apartment, there turned out to be an indie movie theater– not a theater that shows indie movies, but a single movie theater whose owners showed whatever the hell they likeed. Sam drove past. “Holy shit, they’re showing Iron Sky this week!” he said, delighted.
“Ione Skye, the actress?” I asked, distracted by hunger.
“I-R-O-N.”
“Ah.”
Soon after I left, they screened The Room, which Sam saw for the fifth or sixth time. But I’d heard good things about Ruby Sparks, so we went to see that at the Landmark Midtown. Sam took issue with the plot, complaining that it was too similar to A Doll’s House, but really both of us were too unhappy with the elderly couple talking at full volume about the movie as it was happening, either to criticize the movie or predict the next line of dialogue.
We considered this over burgers at the Vortex, an adults-only restaurant trying way too hard to be edgy. The 1950s nudie mags were a nice touch, but they only reminded me of a much better restaurant in San Francisco.
I was in a bad mood, having already spent the majority of the day being shown around the sweltering netherworld of North Avenue by a homeless man before eating some terrible pizza. I’d tried to get into my book, the Oxford University Press’ history of Spain, where I planned to go in the winter, but the text was so joyless and dry that I had to let it go, squelch back to the Apartment, and take a nap.
Day Seventeen
My last day in town wasn’t much better, though it was nice to get to know the area. I wouldn’t have been troubled by a couple miles’ walk in California, but in this nightmarish monsoonal climate, just getting to American Apparel for a new pair of salmon short-shorts was basically Fitzcarraldo. Not finding what I needed, I traced my steps back to a nearby Urban Outfitters for a pair that was frayed and required rolling up the legs.
That night, Sam and I found the kind of restaurant we’d grown up with in Pasadena, the kind that used to be a house, in a lush little valley surrounded by Midtown skyscrapers. It was called Pasta da Pulcinella, and we wasted no expense on what would be our farewell. The next morning, after three weeks together, he dropped me off at ATL.
I didn’t hear from him for a week after. He didn’t hear from me either, but then again, nobody did.