It was a midsummer afternoon and my old friend Dawn and I were walking from an un-air-conditioned Nepalese restaurant to our hotel in the dull, flat town of Montrose, Colorado. The sun seemed larger than usual, and brighter. It felt as if we were under a broiler. The road we were on was six lanes wide, or maybe eight. There was no sidewalk, so we were pressed right up against the curb, being passed by flatulent motorcycles—their riders helmetless—and eighteen-wheel trucks that were equally loud but at least generated a breeze. One of the many good things about Dawn is that she never complains about walking, never says, “You told me it was only another few blocks an hour ago,” never moans that her feet are tired or so swollen that her shoes no longer fit. The farther the better, that’s our motto.
Our record is forty-three miles in a single day—ninety-one thousand steps, according to our Fitbits. “Where did you do this?” people ask when I boast about it. It’s a question that baffles me. If someone told me he’d eaten seventy-five corn dogs in one sitting, my response wouldn’t be “Where?” but “Why not seventy-six corn dogs? Why not eighty?”
We always talk about breaking our record—going for a hundred thousand steps—but now I worry that we might be too old, and how weird is that? I was nineteen when we met in the front hall of our dormitory at Kent State, and Dawn was a year younger. We know each other’s siblings, and before they all died we knew each other’s parents as well. Dawn’s father was a jazz musician who fell to his death in a skydiving accident when he was fifty. Her mother was a former flight attendant who doted on her two sons but constantly picked at her daughter’s appearance, though I’ll never understand why. Dawn dresses like a Swiss person. That is to say, she looks at all times as if she is headed to the airport, where she will fly business class. Everything matches or is color-coördinated, usually in earth tones. When I tell people that her wedding dress was brown, she corrects me, saying, “Not brown—driftwood.”
Which is brown.
She makes all her own clothes, Dawn, save for some socks and underwear, though she could likely turn those out as well. Of everyone I know, she’d fare best if forced to live in a secluded cabin or fifteenth-century Europe. She just has that look about her—wiry and no-nonsense. Doesn’t own any makeup. Smells like a cardboard box. Dawn grows her hair out, then chops it off to donate it to cancer patients. What remains is naturally straw-colored—not a touch of gray—and easy to imagine beneath a bonnet or a snood. She hasn’t used an A.T.M. since 1990, when the machine ate her card, and as for a phone, forget it. Can’t make calls but can make yarn, paper, ink, and some kind of non-dairy ice cream that tastes like fallen leaves.
Dawn travels with me quite often when I’m on tour. She likes working the line, writing people’s names on Post-it notes and sticking them to the title pages of the books to be signed.
“Who was that . . . woman?” someone will invariably ask, implying that Dawn had been strict or unfriendly.
Once, in Uruguay, I forced her to take a test that would determine whether she was autistic. I’d had my suspicions but became certain after we spent a Halloween together and I watched her hand miniature staplers and homemade granola bars to the trick-or-treaters who came to her door.
“Kids don’t want crap like that,” I told her as one after another stomped off into the dark.
“Sure they do,” she said. “I mean, it’s the kind of stuff I’d want.”
“Yes, well, you’re strange.”
To my great surprise, Dawn turned out not to be autistic.
What puts people off is most likely her body language—the way she crosses her arms over her chest, for example, makes her look impatient. Also, her voice can be kind of flat. Totally flat, actually, if she doesn’t know you. “What?” she says when I point it out. “I’m friendly. I’m always friendly!”
During the height of the pandemic, a woman spit on Dawn. “We were in the grocery store, and I hadn’t done anything to her,” she told me. “I guess she didn’t like that I had a mask on.”
One of Dawn’s lungs collapsed when she was in her late fifties, so she was super cautious about Covid—kept her face covered long after everyone else had returned to normal. We were in Chicago together, at O’Hare, in the spring of 2022, when I told her she needed to take it off.
“But—” she said.
“Let it go,” I told her. “Everyone else has.”
I felt like a director coercing an actress to unhook her bra for a sex scene. “Come on,” I said. “You can do this. Start by just . . . lowering it to your chin.”
She took off her mask, and then of course immediately got Covid—a bad case, too. All my fault, but she’s never held it against me.
Fifteen months later, walking along the busy highway in Montrose, Colorado, we came upon three eighteen-wheelers parked on a dusty lot. The doors of one were open, and inside were stacks of new-smelling tires. “If you had a year, do you think you could eat one of those?” I asked, pausing to wipe the dirt and sweat off my forehead with a bandanna I’d been carrying. “If you had to, I mean.”
Dawn looked inside the truck. “A tire? Sure, if it didn’t kill me. First thing I’d do is cut it into three hundred and sixty-five pieces, then divide each of those into pill-size portions I’d eat throughout the day.”
It was exactly what I would do. “I wonder what percentage of people would put it off to the last minute,” I said. “Can you imagine? Time is almost up. You have a knife in one hand, a fork in the other, and are staring down an untouched radial tire thinking, Fuck!”
A convertible roared by, and we could briefly hear the music the driver was playing, a song that neither of us would ever voluntarily listen to. “That’s what my brother would do—put it off,” I told her. “Then, there’d be people who’d wait until the last minute and beg you to help them. It’s the Ant and the Grasshopper, when you really think about it, and, though I’m not proposing this, if you had to cull the population, I think this would be a pretty good way to do it. Those who eat their tire by the deadline stay. Those who put it off and make excuses die.”
“That seems fair,” Dawn said, adding that kids could be given bicycle tires.
Our hotel in Montrose was so close to the airport we could hear car doors slamming as passengers were dropped off at the terminal. “Love you.” “Call us when you get there.”
It was a boxy chain place, meat-locker cold and smelling of chlorine. But the young woman at the front desk, who had a streak of blue in her hair and wore enough makeup for three people her size, was efficient and welcoming. While checking in earlier that afternoon, we’d learned that she’d soon be taking the exam for her cosmetology license. Her study book was beside her when we came in after lunch, so we asked her to throw us a few test questions.
“O.K.,” she said, and glanced down, squinting. “How long does it take for a lost toenail to grow back?”
“A year,” Dawn said quickly, the way a contestant on a game show might, adding that she and I lose them all the time.
The young woman took a half step back. “Why?”
“Because we walk so much,” I told her. “Every other month, I’ll pull off a sock, feel something hard inside of it, and realize . . .”
“. . . you’ve lost a toenail,” Dawn said. “Sometimes I’ll tape mine back on,” she continued. “It gives the little membrane underneath more protection as it grows.”
This was something that I hadn’t known. “You tape your toenails back on?”
She looked down at her feet. “Well, sure, but not all of them.”
The young woman’s next question had to do with pH balance. Dawn got that answer right, too, though it may have been luck. I mean, it was multiple choice.
We were in Montrose because we had to fly out very early the next morning, and so it seemed smarter to stay near the airport than in Telluride, where my reading would take place. Because I never got my license and Dawn is, admittedly, a hopelessly bad driver, a man named Kevin had been hired to chauffeur us. He was sixty, I guessed, and had graying hair gathered into a foot-long ponytail. When Kevin was young, he and his brothers would set traps and catch muskrats and beavers. Mountain lions as well. “Then we’d skin ’em out and sell the pelts for clothes and school supplies,” he told us.
Dawn, sitting beside me in the back seat, mending a shirt that I had torn, adjusted her glasses. “Killing mountain lions! I don’t like that one bit!”
I didn’t like it, either, but what do I know of life in the West, of growing up poor on the back of a horse? Then, too, I’m just not confrontational. If someone told me he kept a dozen teen-age girls locked in his basement as sex slaves, I’d likely ask, “Does it cost a lot to feed them?” Not Dawn, though.
“The other night, we were in Beaver Creek,” I said to Kevin, hoping to change the subject. “Have you been? They have a store there that sells wine and spirits and is called Beaver Liquors. No joke!”
As he laughed, we came upon a mean-looking town where, we were told, “True Grit” had been filmed. The hills surrounding it were scrub-covered and severe—crawling with snakes, I suspected. A sign in front of a church read “It’s Not Hot as Hell.”
A bit farther along, the land was greener, and Kevin pointed out Ralph Lauren’s nearly seventeen-thousand-acre Double RL Ranch. Then he showed us a spot where, a few nights earlier, he’d come upon a bear and her cub crossing the road. “They was taking their sweet time, too,” he said. “I stopped right yonder and waited for them to reach the other side.”
The land changed again an hour or so later, as we neared Telluride. Now there were steep mountains with red cliffs visible through the aspens. “Pronghorns get up there, then kick damn rocks down on you,” Kevin said. I had been on the fence about him but now felt certain that, given a year, he would have not only eaten his tire but helped someone else eat theirs.
Because of its film festival, I’d thought Telluride might be good-sized, but in fact it’s dinky—only two and a half thousand year-round residents.
We had arrived early and had an hour to wander about before returning for sound check. Know someone for as long as I’ve known Dawn and you figure you’ve got pretty much everything covered, at least in your pasts. So it surprised me, during our walk, to learn that when she was seven she befriended a man of twenty-six who lived not far from her family in Marion, Ohio. “I don’t remember where we met. He was single, and I’d go to his house after school. Maybe we’d play board games or go on bike rides, depending on the weather. He was a lot of fun.”
We had discovered Telluride’s outdoor pool and were looking at the swimmers through the chain-link fence. “What did your parents think?” I asked.
“For a long time, they didn’t know,” Dawn said. “Then my dad found out. After the two of them finally met, he came to me saying, ‘You didn’t mention that your friend Howard is deaf.’ I was, like, ‘Really? I just thought he was quiet.’ ”
“Quiet is letting the other person do most of the talking,” I told her. “Deaf is letting them do all of it. That aside, I love that no one made a big stink about it. Can you imagine that happening now? The man would be arrested, along with the parents. Everyone would go directly to jail except for the kid, who’d be in mandatory counselling for the rest of her life.”
It’s startling to age and hear yourself talking like this: “When I was young, a child could have a lonely adult bachelor as a friend!”
“He had a lot of javelins in his house,” Dawn recalled. “It turned out he’d thrown them at the ’64 Olympics.”
“That makes it even better!” I said, brushing some cottonwood fluff from the back of her dress, then leaving my hand to rest for a moment on her shoulder.
When people ask how I know Dawn, I sometimes say, “She was my girlfriend my second year of college.” I always worry, though, that it makes her look dumb, especially if I’m at the theatre after a reading and am wearing a sports coat that for all intents and purposes is a gown. She was my girlfriend, though. Held my hand as someone in our dorm basement pierced my ear. Wrapped her arms around my waist as we sledded down the campus’s one decent hill. Stayed up nights to help me with sculpture projects. Everyone knew us as a couple. We were in love. Back at Kent State, loving Dawn meant hating myself—for being gay, for being too cowardly to admit it, and, ultimately, for hurting her the way I did. I will forever be grateful that she forgave me, and that we can be in love again. “How’s your little wife?” Hugh will ask after she and I have spent time together.
Does Dawn’s husband, Matt, behave this way? I often wonder. The thing is that she and I knew each other first—before Hugh and Matt. Before Reagan and AIDS. Before computers and Fox News and Run DMC. My feelings toward her are proprietary. Though currently on loan to her husband and stepchildren in the city of Red Wing, Minnesota, Dawn is mine, and although we’ve never discussed it, I’m pretty sure I’m hers as well. I know because I can feel it. When we’re travelling and when we’re apart. In high-altitude Telluride and sea-level Singapore. In Japan and the United Arab Emirates. In Argentina and Iowa and all the places we go just so we can walk our toenails off and be together. ♦
