Twenty years ago, long before “Quiet Quitting” or the “Great Resignation” were in our vernacular, I shocked a lot of people by walking away from my job. It wasn’t a particularly great job, being head bartender at California Pizza Kitchen in downtown Los Angeles, but the money was decent and I worked maybe 30 hours per week. It afforded me plenty of time to write, which was why I moved from Boston to LA.

I remember my boss at the time, a very nice and hard-working gentleman named Johnny, being genuinely concerned at my decision. He was in his early 40s, had a family, and couldn’t understand why I would leave a good company that could offer me a solid career. He always wanted me to become a manager, and I had always steadfastly refused.

The reason was simple . . . I had wanted to quit the day I had started.

It was the summer of 1999 when I applied and was hired at the CPK on Figueroa Street. My previous place of employment, a restaurant in West Hollywood, had just gone out of business, and I desperately needed to pay my rent. While I had a bachelor’s in journalism from Boston University and a master’s degree in mass communication from Emerson College, the only jobs I were seeking back then were in the food industry. I dreamed of being a screenwriter, but mixing drinks and serving pizza were the only things anyone would pay me to do.

So I kept going into CPK five days a week for the next four years, making great friends in the process (some lifelong ones), and also writing six screenplays that would not sell. The last one I had very high hopes for, and had been fortunate enough to have it read at a couple of top agencies. I’d been invited to lunch by one of them, and I was certain I would be signed.

It never happened, and that was crushing.   I’d gotten so close . . .

But I kept slogging it out, revising my scripts, starting new ones, and submitting my work to agencies and studios. By 2003 it had been five years since I’d arrived in town, and I had found zero success. I was mentally and emotionally worn down. I had to leave LA.

While I did have a couple of degrees, at that point in my life I had few marketable skills outside of mixing a tasty margarita.  My bank account only contained only about two thousand dollars.  Quitting was a big deal.  Most people thought I was crazy.

They were probably right. What sane person leaves their job to drive a 12-year-old car, with a cracked windshield and aging tires and no radio or air-conditioning, 5,000 miles up and across America? Lunacy was my starting point.

Earlier in 2003, I had read with wonder Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. The previous year I had been transfixed by Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Two inspirational books of adventure and escape, exactly what I needed at that point in my life. I’d been incepted.

So I made the decision to surrender the nametag and apron, give up my apartment in Los Feliz, and hit the road alone.  It had to be alone, because I knew the journey was going to be as much a mental cleanse as a chance to see and experience new places.

*****      

It seems almost impossible it’s been 20 years since this cross-country adventure. 

I kept an audio journal (into a digital tape recorder that I later transcribed), and I originally planned to use the trip as a basis for my second novel (A Model Community, my first, had been published just 3 months before I made the journey).  That never happened, but through the years I’ve revisited the material and tinkered with it, hoping to do something with all those words. 

As we’re now in the 20th anniversary of this trip, I figured why not put the journal out there into the world as blog posts instead of collecting digital dust.

Driving from Los Angeles to Seattle, and then all the way to Boston completely alone, remains one of the most cherished things I’ve ever done.  I’m certain these two decades that followed would have been drastically different had I never gotten in that 1991 Passat Wagon and started east on the 101 Freeway.

Over the upcoming weeks, I’m going to post an edited version of my audio journal that started on June 19, 2003 and ended on July 1^st of that year. While I had nobody in the passenger seat on this epic journey, I hope you’ll call shotgun and join along as I travel back in time.

I drove 5,139 miles over thirteen days, traveled through 14 states as well as Canada, and didn’t use a cell phone once.  I slept in hotels, my friend’s places, and in the backseat of my car along the road.  I’d love to do a trip like this again someday, though I know it would never be the same.