A Postcard from the Twilight Zone

I awoke profoundly early the other day, at 3 a.m., that dead zone on the clock face where it’s both too-late and too-early at the very same time.

The Twilight Zone.

I skipped brushing my teeth and quickly brewed two cups of coffee for the road because my local Starbucks wouldn’t be opening until 4:30 a.m.

I didn’t want to wait that long, because I was in a hurry. 

I was leaving Las Vegas.

When I was a kid, my father liked to embark on family driving vacations in the middle of the night. You beat traffic that way, had the highway to yourself.

And in a nation gripped by panic over the spreading Covid-19 outbreak, that’s precisely what I needed: a road of my own.

Except there was no such road. Lumbering transport trucks clogged the lanes as I pulled out onto the I-15 south. Cars with California plates rushed past in a frenzy to get someplace, or away from something. 

It was 3:45 a.m.

Amid the pitch-black of the high desert, I was headed toward Barstow, where I planned to go north to Bakersfield, pick up the I-5 through California’s Central Valley before veering west toward the San Francisco Bay Area.

In an era of a creeping unseen virus, one place seems as good as another to hole up and wait out the coming Armageddon. 

But my wife lives in the Bay Area and, if I was going to be a good citizen and practice advanced social-distancing, I thought I might as well do it with her.

Her employer issued a work-from-home order for the next three weeks, so we would face the crumbling world — and each other — together.

Hunter S. Thompson had his Woody Creek, Colorado shotgun-shack where he could cock his double-gauge and shoot to kill if he encountered any unwanted varmints.

I have a one-bedroom condo in San Mateo, Calif.

It felt like the right thing to do, this hightailing it in the dead of night, so I packed the contents of my refrigerator, gathered a month’s worth of books, turned on the house-alarm, and headed off into the darkness.

As I drove in silence, I suddenly wondered if I was taking part in some needless game of panic. Yet I had witnessed some unsettling changes of late in my Las Vegas bedroom community. For one, my neighbors have stopped waving. They pass with their eyes on the road, too preoccupied for any such niceties.

In the U.S., and most anywhere else, we all observe a wafer-thin veneer of social decorum. Open a door for a stranger, give someone else the right of way, strike up a conversation at the grocery store checkout line.

But I have seen those good manners quickly slip away. There was a horrifying video on social media where two women shoppers threw punches, pulled hair and blackened eyes over a few rolls of toilet paper. Not society’s proudest moment.

And it’s only going to get worse, I presume.

A week ago, at my local Costco, I met the gaze of a fellow customer who was wearing not one, but two surgical masks, like some Chernobyl nuclear power plant worker.

She looked at me with a withering gaze that frightened me. It said, ‘If you approach me in any way, I will kill you before I sacrifice any of these hoarded goods on this pallet.’

‘I am hunter and I am gatherer and you are my enemy.’

This morning, I hear, there were more than a thousand people waiting to get inside that same Costco. I pity the unsuspecting soul who tried to break into that line.

On the drive out of the desert, I left the radio off on purpose. I knew the drill: More people sickened, more deaths, but now in new places. 

Instead I thought of my late father, some funny things he said. I called three of my sisters who lived on the East Coast. My West Coast peeps were still asleep.

When I reached Barstow it was still dark. I wanted more coffee, but decided not to stop. I hit Route-58 toward Bakersfield, passed the town of Boron, its menacing factory lit up like a penitentiary, and passed the towns of Mojave and Tehachapi, just as the eastern sky began to glow.

I took a picture out my passenger window as I sped along. My entire world was colored in a deep purple and I felt very much alone.

The sun was up by the time I reached Bakersfield. 

What I did there, looking back, kind of embarrassed me.

First, I stopped for gas. But instead of grabbing the pump nozzle barehanded, I reached into the car for a piece of plastic I’d used to wrap some cheese for breakfast, and used that to cushion myself against any contagion that might be lurking there.

It was a sensible thing do to. Don’t take chances. Who knows who might have touched that pump last?

Then I noticed the gaze of three Latino farmworkers who stood in a clutch at the next island, comparing notes, whispering in the way you do at 6 am. The middle one was watching me, silently observing how I refused to touch that bloody pump.

And I suddenly felt naked. Foolish. Panicked.

Here was a man who obviously worked with his bare hands, who no doubt took chances amid his dangerous farm life that I would not take.

I suddenly felt like some pampered city boy.

I screwed on my gas cap, tossed away my plastic hand-condom and hurried away.

At a nearby Starbucks, I got a 16-ounce coffee. My sister had told me that many Starbucks had discontinued the self-serve sugar and creamer stations as a public precaution, but apparently they hadn’t gotten the memo in Bakersfield.

I covered my hand in a napkin, tended to my coffee and then used the restroom, not coming into contact with the door knob or sink faucet, feeling clumsy and unpracticed at not touching things, of being afraid, very afraid.

I hurried out of that coffee shop, like I’d just been sprung from prison.

I didn’t stop the rest of the way to San Francisco. When I arrived, I unloaded my larder and heard my wife on the phone with a friend, who had offered to share some of the toilet paper she’d bought. They ordered plastic gloves online and planned to order more foodstuffs so they didn’t have to brave any Costco or grocery store. 

I ordered a Mr. Coffee, a bean grinder and some coffee online.

There would be no Starbucks for me, not for a while.

I now follow a strict set of house rules.

Wear the same clothes outside and take them off as soon as you get home, and spray the bottom of your shoes with sanitizer. Wear a handmade mask in any public setting. My wife watches me wash my hands, to make sure I hum two Happy Birthdays.

In this unbrave new world, I do as I’m told.