HIT THE NORTH part 5

The first person I see upon getting out of the car in Minneapolis is a man with a black eye and a badly bruised face. It seems to bode ill. I liked the look of the guy.

The usual obligatory maddening few hours are spent driving around, emitting gross fumes, becoming increasingly more unhinged as nothing appealing or affordable offers itself in the way of lodgings. There are no cheap old hotels in downtown Minneapolis. This I glean from a night clerk at a residential hotel which does not cater to overnight guests. I comb the Twin Cities to no avail, eventually putting up at an Econolodge, where I almost destroy the broken snack machine in a fit of frustration.

As I drive around impatiently on one-way streets among timid drivers, I search for Peter’s Grill, an old-fashioned cafeteria I’d noticed last time around, and eventually find it... closed.

On a bitterly cold morning, I take a walk around the warehouse district, before driving out to the nearest racetrack, Canterbury Park, with off-track betting on my mind—live racing only takes place there during the summer months.

I pick all the bits of shredded hard-boiled egg out of the salad

It’s just another horseplayer’s paradise, with room after room filled with banks of television monitors broadcasting races from all over the country, in front of which an almost exclusively older male clientele pore over various forms and sheets. I arrive in time for the first Hollywood Park race and proceed to lose one race after another before retreating to the restaurant to regroup and struggle with a Cobb salad—I forgot to tell them to hold the egg and have to pick all the shredded hard-boiled bits out of it.

The spacious lounges begin to thin out. It looks cold, dark and lonely out there beyond the glass facade. I’m one of the few remaining horseplayers, betting the last races in California. In the Hollywood Park nightcap I pair two horses on top in the trifecta, each of them going off at 5/1. One wins by daylight, and the other rallies for second. There are a few tense minutes while Julie Krone, the rider of the horse that got up for third, at 12/1, claims foul against the runner-up, but the stewards let the order stand and the trifecta pays $527. This seems to bode well for Hibbing.

I lean out of the car window in order to seek directions from one of the many fat blonde women who inhabit these parts, but she refuses to acknowledge me, just keeps walking. Seeking directions, receiving direct shuns. Aggrieved by her needless fear, I shout and honk the horn at her, and I’m reminded of what a Midwestern friend once said about Minnesotans being ‘scared’.

Nevertheless—always the less—a young man yells at me because, apparently, I’m staring at him. I park outside a Sex Shoppe on Hennepin, fortify myself on a pastry and a cup of tea, and walk back to the car with my hand nearly freezing off. After much misdirection, I drive out of town on the wrong way highway.

I pull over to use the rest room at a Home Depot in the middle of nowhere, consume a couple of stomach-turning White Castle hamburgers, and proceed to whip myself into a frantic state of irritation and horror at the inconveniences of modern life. Eventually I find my way onto the right highway. At midnight I check into the Pines motel in Hinckley.

Now that the return is verging upon reality, my mission has lost all sense of urgency and grace. But that never stopped me before. The beauty of the original experience was in the spontaneity, and nothing could be more calculating than this return visit, driving into town like a contract killer on a mission I don’t believe in anymore. Such experiences as I enjoyed three nights ago in Hibbing cannot be recaptured or resumed. But that won’t stop me from repeating myself. There isn’t a force on earth that can stop me from repeating myself.

How should I present myself when I ‘pass through’ Hibbing? I can’t let Stacey know that I came all the way back in order to take a walk with her through the fallen leaves. Just walk into the bar and do what I didn’t do last time, I tell myself.

She was still preoccupied with that soured five-year relationship. She found blonde hairs in the bed: belonging to the woman that her boyfriend knocked up, with twins. That’s when she left him, got into her black truck and headed to Hibbing, lured there by the Dylan connection.

A willowy brunette, accompanied by a little boy, is getting into her car outside the health food store on the hill in Duluth. “Hi,” she says, and holds my gaze. It’s hard to tell if it’s a come-hither or a get-lost look. It doesn’t matter. I grab a sandwich and keep driving, nerves quavering. The further north I drive the milder the weather becomes. It doesn’t feel right, none of it feels right.

The locals, on the whole, were not particularly friendly towards me. Far from it, some were blatantly hostile. Two men voiced a desire to assault me during my one night in Hibbing. My return might incur further aggravation: the entire town could descend upon me, wanting blood. I’m somewhat wary of that individual in the Sportsmen’s who wanted to “deck the limey,” and of Kevin, who prevented the attack, but who, by the end of the evening, also wanted to deck me. It’s possible that these men have subsequently expressed regret at not having assaulted me at the time and will delight in getting another opportunity. I might experience a change more violent than cathartic: a thug-on-aesthete attack.

There’s snow on the ground in Hibbing, but none, sadly, falling through the air. I arrive at a dull, potentially deadly time of day, driving down 1^st Avenue in the middle of the afternoon. I still haven’t decided how to present myself, and spontaneity is out of the question.

My first stop is the Hong Kong Café, where Stacey works part-time. I take a deep breath and stride in like an assassin, through the beaded curtain in the doorway. The place is empty but for one table occupied by a pair of old women. “Are you looking for someone?” asks an old Chinese woman, probably the owner, in a tone of voice that she probably wouldn’t use with a potential customer. I reply in the negative and continue walking through the long, narrow, cozy room with curtained booths and tasteful lamp-lighting. The Chinese woman repeats the question in a tone that suggests she would prefer it if I left. At the other end, near the kitchen, another waitress sits at a little table, counting money. She looks up at me as if I were deranged, which I must have appeared, and certainly felt.

I retreat to the car and drive off. The waitress watches from the window. Not taking down my license plate number, I hope.

I park outside the Sunrise Bakery and sit there for a long time, trying to recover my wits. In this I fail, and after a while I drive down Howard and park a block away from the Sportsmen’s, on the opposite side of the street.

Eventually, as if on autopilot, I get out of the car, and enter the Sportsmen’s. I walk in, readjust my vision to the darkness and cast my eyes around the bar. “Hi,” says the alveolate-complexioned character behind the bar, known as Toad or Raskolnikov. I hadn’t realized he worked there and wonder if he recognizes me or if he is greeting me as he would any stranger who stumbled in.

As all the signs suggest on such an intractably unpropitious day, Stacey isn’t there. In order not to appear lost, I walk out through the restaurant and back onto the street, where the good citizens of Hibbing are going about their business, oblivious to my demented quest, and across the road to the library.

She isn’t there either.

I take a walk along the peaceful bare-treed, snow-covered streets, past the high school, Dylan’s alma mater, and past his boyhood home. I get back in the car and drive around aimlessly. I park on a cross street by Zimmy’s, a block down from the Sportsmen’s. Now that I have actually returned, I have to ask myself, what the fuck am I doing here? I remain in the car, waiting for my mood to change, for the overall atmosphere to become more favorable, but it only becomes murkier and more misaligned. All I’m doing is ruining the memory of the previous visit.

Still sloppily focused on my supposed goal, I walk up to the Sportsmen’s but can’t bring myself to enter. It isn’t easy to peek inconspicuously through the window. I open the door a little and quickly scan the room, noting Toad’s presence and Stacey’s absence.

The last time around, Toad had seemed an outcast. Now, behind the bar, he has assumed a position of authority, and I feel like an intruder, absorbed in a moral disaster, working in spite of reason. I let the crack in the door close again and return to the car by climbing over the short wall outside Zimmy’s in such a manner that I can’t be seen by anybody who might have been looking down the street from the Sportsmen’s, as if I have something to hide: shame, perhaps; embarrassment, definitely.

It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there. I drive up Howard, enter the 412 Bar and order a bottle of MGD. “Good taste,” remarks a barfly. I sit at the counter and play the music trivia game—Which year did the Doobie Brothers album Takin’ It to the Streets debut: 1975, 1976, 1977?—dragging it out for as long as possible, delaying having to follow through on this futile mission, knowing that having come this far I must at least pretend to make an honest attempt at making contact with her even if my heart’s not in it anymore. I order another MGD.

I return to the library and sit there for a long time, consuming such mentally dulling trash as People and Rolling Stone, until the purity of my mission has become completely sullied, my presence in town a deadened mystery. I drive by the Hong Kong Café again and peer through the window. I return to the Sportsmen’s, open the door a crack again and stare in. Toad is still present. But there is no sign of her anywhere, and I am behaving more like a bedraggled, bedeviled stalker than a man on a romantic mission.

I drive up the alley behind the Sportsmen’s. The lights are on in the window of what I assume is her apartment. I climb up the rickety back stairs and open the door into the musty hallway. Her door, if it is her door, is decorated with a few stickers, and propped slightly open by a pair of large furry dice. I knock, and knock again. There is no answer, and I skulk off, descending the back stairs as quietly as possible. I could swear I saw the curtains move.

I drive around the corner and park outside the plant (I never did find out what that appealing remnant of downtown industrial architecture actually was) and sit in the car for a long time, pondering the situation. Following the timid tapping on the door, she could have looked through the window and seen the car driving down the alley, but in the darkness she wouldn’t have seen me at the wheel.

I steel myself and drive back up the alley. I park the car again and ascend the shaky back stairway. This time the curtain moves, unmistakably. I can’t keep going. I can’t go up there again. I turn around and leave town, trying not to be too disgusted with myself over this further massive failure of nerve, and more or less succeed in numbing myself towards this necessary end.

Despite the lateness of the hour, the bell-ringing Salvation Army woman is still standing outside the Greysolon building in Duluth. I drop some coins into her tin, and she regales me with the history of the building. Greysolon Duluth was the city founder. The Graysolon was once a Schroder hotel. Two Schroder hotels are still operating: one in Milwaukee, the other in Fond du Lac.

I get back in the car and drive around. After a while, I find myself in West Duluth, drawn to the massage parlor. The ruined blonde is still at the window.

“Two girls are working,” she tells me. “A white and an Oriental.”

I walk in.