With my first quarter-century gone, I would say I had settled into some pretty serious drifting. I had spent the biggest part of my adult life drifting. I understood it. My style was understated, but within certain parameters I could float about with the best of them. Despite appearances, I was a lifer.

A lot of people I knew wanted to stop. I’m not really sure why. I forced myself to hunker down against them. I became very good at hunkering down. As I told everybody, “Hey, I have a job. Maybe it’s a career!” I worked in a late-night college-area greasy-spoon, the Shorthorn No. 3, waiting tables, bussing, cooking sometimes, serving as goodwill ambassador to our intoxicated but truth-seeking clientele of students and street people, all in sight of the University of Texas tower, icon of the illustrious institution where I had finished college thirty credit hours short of an English degree. (The establishment’s name, while undoubtedly a takeoff on the university sports team mascot, was something of a mystery, there being no Shorthorn No. 1 or No. 2.) The institution had prepared me well for my vocation of drifting. There—that’s what it was—a vocation, a calling, a life choice, a ministry. I was ministering to the late-night minions, broken souls who needed a place to be and people to see.

Julio was Night Manager at the Shorthorn No. 3, and he was my friend, my mentor, my guide. Julio was not his real name—his real name was Al—and late-night restaurant work not his real profession. In real life, he was a songwriter and singer on the verge of breaking through big. One night I listened to a demo CD he had cut, and he was good, damn good, part progressive country, part Northeastern smart-ass protest poet.

Julio had drifted a lot longer than I had. With his 40th birthday coming around, he was balding rapidly, though he wore what hair he had in a long pony-tail, often with a scarf atop his head. His acne-scarred face was masked by a dark greasy beard, remarkably Castro-like. (I never told him this.) His upper lip, too, seemed unusually large and constantly sneering, though whether this was simply a physical trait or a symptom of some inner disdain, I could not be sure. What was great about Julio was that he didn’t worry about unimportant things any more, or anything out of his control. He didn’t worry about his parents. He didn’t worry about what society thought. He had broken free of all of those chains. There were sporadic flare-ups with his ex-wife Rhonda when she showed up at the Shorthorn No. 3 to berate him about credit card bills, but he released the tension from these visits with Vodka shots and a few tokes of weed. Imbibing also, the rest of us helped him with his tension release. As for credit card bills, I had personally observed him shredding them unopened then tossing the shards away. It was a brave, powerful display. He was as close to a free man as I had ever known.

Jacqueline worked with us too, there at the diner. Somewhat older than myself, Jacqueline had a rich beautiful nest of straight platinum blonde hair—dyed, Julio informed me, though I chose to believe it was her natural color—and dangly earrings and a knockout smile that sometimes, occasionally, faded into a scary, tough-as-nails glare. She had a gorgeous face, delicate, model-quality almost, not sweet precisely, but very soulful, and a figure like a Rockette, long of leg and firm to the touch. She appeared to me as a beautiful gypsy girl who had wandered away from her tribe and landed here, a forlorn, dramatic character. Though filled with intense feelings, Jacqueline was inconsistent, maddeningly, endearingly inconsistent. Sometimes she moved quickly, making others catch up to her, other times she moved slow, making everybody wait. She expected you to follow.

Julio and I both loved her, I had come to realize, but it was undetermined which of us she preferred, because although Julio was older and more experienced, I was definitely funnier. While Julio’s attempts at humor were mainly duds, I don’t mind saying that I could be hilarious at times. Funniness kept me going during bad periods of drifting. It was almost like a career of its own, unpaid, unrecognized. Jacqueline let me kiss her sometimes, when we were goofing off after work, on the lips. It was wonderful, but it was only kisses, nothing more. “I don’t want to spoil you,” Jacqueline said. “You’re like a kid, beautiful and innocent.” I let her think that, because it seemed to make her want to kiss me, but I wanted to shout out: “Spoil me! Go ahead! I’ll be fine! It won’t ruin me!” I didn’t know if she let Julio kiss her. I hoped not. I didn’t want to think about it.

Jacqueline had married early, on her 18th birthday, June 21, three weeks after fin-ishing high school. Her birthday was the first day of summer, the longest day of the year, and she took pride in that, as if it were some kind of omen. She ran off to Mexico that day to elope with a former quarterback from their high school football team, the Athens (Texas) High Hornets. Carl Lewis was his name, the same name as that Olympic sprinter. Carl was older than Jacqueline, twenty-five, and he claimed to have been offered a scholarship to play football at Texas A&M, but turned it down. So instead he went to work for South-western Bell, installing and repairing lines. Their marriage lasted five years, until Carl Lewis decided they should have a child. Jacqueline did not want to have a child with Carl Lewis. She did not want to live with him. She felt that she had evolved beyond Carl to a new, more refined plane of existence. “Carl wanted to control me,” Jacqueline said. “He wanted to mold me into something I’m not.” She didn’t want to be controlled. She didn’t want to be molded. She had seen enough of being controlled growing up in small-town East Texas with a conservative Christian father and a society that was as cloying as the humidity of August air. She came to Austin to break away from all that—Austin was a great place to come if you wanted to break away. After her divorce, Jacqueline had studied to become a cosmetologist, but withdrew from classes after the first semester. Now she wanted to become a massage therapist. I told her (boyishly, innocently) that she could practice her skill sets on me. I would never control her, of course. I would never try to mold her into something she wasn’t.

We were all together one night after work, Julio and Jacqueline and me, at the Orange Bull tavern across the street from Shorthorn No. 3, drinking beer, when Julio said, casual-like, as if he had just thought of it, “Let’s go to California.”

“Sure,” I said. “What for?”

“To live there,” Julio said. “To start a new life.”

“A new life?” I said. “When?”

“Right now,” Julio said. “Not tonight, I don’t mean, but soon. As soon as we can get organized. Next week maybe. The next few days.”

“Next week?” I said. “The next few days?” I guess you could say I was stalling. I was trying to figure out how I would feel. I was trying to control my voice, too, because it seemed to be taking on a life of its own, high-pitched and squawky. Like all men, drifters or not, I wanted my voice to be strong and low and under control.

Julio looked exasperated. He looked at me as though I were some dense, dumb-butt ten-year-old who could not understand simple directions. My eyes got watery. Anytime somebody looked at me like that my eyes got watery. Julio was originally from Brooklyn, N.Y., but sometimes he acted a whole lot like my San Antonio, Texas, father, put out and obtuse about the reason I would or wouldn’t do a certain thing. My father was of the mind set that pretty much everybody in the world should be of the same mind set.

“Why the hell not?” said Julio, leaning forward, leaning forward in such an aggressive posture that I was forced to lean back. He sneered. “What are you waiting for? What’s going on here?” He spread out his hand to indicate this place, this city, this point in time. Well, nothing really, of course, but I guess that I felt somewhat in control here. I felt that I was in charge of the details of my own life.

We both looked toward Jacqueline, trying to gauge her reaction. She could be hard to read sometimes. She could pretend that she felt one way when she really felt another. She could make you feel like she was in love with you one minute and that you were a worthless pest the next.

Jacqueline nodded yes. Then she looked at me for a second. She wasn’t sure. Damn, I wish I could have relayed some signal to her by ESP just then: “Go with me, me alone! Let’s get a place together and start a family. We’ll settle down. We’ll live on a farm outside of town and grow our own crops and swim naked in the river. You can set up your massage studio there.”

“I’ll go if both of you are going,” I said instead. I’m not sure why I said that. It was like somebody else, somebody with a trained theatrical voice, was saying it.

“I’ll go too, then,” Jacqueline said. I could see her saying that and then planning already to back out, leaving us in the lurch, leaving just Julio and me to go by ourselves. That I resolved not to do. If that happened, I could see myself disappearing at some godforsaken rest stop out in the boondocks while Julio waited for me and I never came back. Julio and me alone in California together would be a nightmare. Horrible.

Sweeping floors at work the following day, the concept of going to California began to grow on me, like a dream of glory. I could be somebody in California, I thought. I began feeling excited. I was talking both extremely politely and incredibly fast. I had never done anything like this before. Though nobody realized this—I had never told anyone—I always worried about what my parents thought, and my siblings back in San Antonio, and even the Irish nuns who taught me in grade school, way back when. In some peculiar sense, I had followed the party line, what was expected of me, society’s plan for old el Steve-o. Though I was drifting, I was drifting within the confines of somebody else’s grand vision. I was ready, at last, to move beyond those outer-imposed limitations to a brave new world of triumphant self-actualization. This was the big break I had been waiting for. I was ready to be on my own. Plans and expectations formed in my head, like grand dramatic productions. For the first time in a long time, it was fun to dream. And with Jacqueline at my side, all things would be possible.

We agreed to meet at 6:00 one Sunday morning in the Shorthorn No. 3 parking lot, like vacationers getting an early start on a long first day. We would take Jacqueline’s car, since she had the best one, a result of her divorce settlement—a big, powerful American car, an Oldsmobile or a Buick, with frigid, blasting A/C and a top-rate CD player and electric everything. I watched Jacqueline screech her way out of the parking lot every morning in that big white beast after work was over. The car seemed right for her somehow—she needed something big and powerful, something brawny. It wouldn’t have seemed right her driving a Camry – nothing Japanese.

The morning we were set to leave was cool and misty, the streetlights above our parking lot projecting cone-shaped auras of wavy yellow light, like halos of saints. I wore a light green windbreaker, New Balance basketball shoes, and tan calf-length cargo shorts, designed to make me appear both well-prepared and debonair. (My hair, unfortunately, was glazed over with an unglamorous coating of mist.) As I arrived, my sensitive, sensible eyes took in the ramshackle white clapboard facade of the Shorthorn No. 3 for the final time, trying to assign this place a place among all the places in my life—homes, schools, playing fields, worksites. I couldn’t quite get it fixed. I could only assign an incomplete, come back to it later, on the road. As I strode forward purposefully to observe Jacqueline and Julio loading a suitcase into the trunk of her car, I was filled with a sudden burst of energy and good cheer. I was all set to hit them with an impromptu joke I had prepared in my mind that morning, something about travelers driving west to the sea. These little jokes had become my trademark, my distinguishing characteristic, my signature move. People expected them. People remembered me by them. The laughter I received for them was like a warm embrace.

The joke never came out. I raised my hand to announce my presence, but quickly put it down. And then I broke down. I couldn’t go to California, I realized. I just couldn’t go. Even love couldn’t overcome this. Everything and everybody I had ever known was in Texas, either here in Austin or seventy-five miles down the road in San Antonio, where I grew up. Though my parents drove me crazy at times I couldn’t imagine being so far away from them. It felt like a betrayal. I still went home some weekends, hung out with old high school friends on Saturday night, ate a big festive dinner that my mother cooked on Sunday afternoon. On my way out of town, my mother loaded me up with groceries in plastic sacks. After haranguing me over my situation, my father sometimes slipped a $20 bill into my hand. With my two brothers and one sister lying in front of the TV I cut up while watching FOX News or CNN or some other show that provided fodder for our internal family jokes. Maybe I enjoyed having them gripe at me about drifting. They must have made me feel important in that way. They provided what the road had not.

“What’s wrong?” Julio said, lip sneering. “You got cold feet?”

“I can’t do this,” I said. “I can’t leave.”

“Why the hell not?” Julio said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel at home here. I don’t think I can live anywhere else.”

“But you’re not doing anything here,” Julio said. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re working in a goddamn student diner, wasting your life away.”

“I know,” I said. My eyes were watering. I tried to keep him from changing my mind. I tried to let him change my mind. I tried to keep from dissolving into tears.

I stood there hoping somehow that Jacqueline would jump into my arms and that we would go back into the empty restaurant and make love on the cement floor. But in-stead she said to Julio, “Well, I guess it’s you and me, Boss. Let’s go to California.” I didn’t even get a final kiss, though I stuck my face in there desperately hoping for one. Jacqueline gave me a little hug and got in the car and they drove off together. Julio was driving. This hurt me more than anything else. It looked like he had been driving her car all along. I had never driven her car. She waved as they screeched around the corner, one of those careless little fingertip waves. Julio gave me something like a military salute.

“No! Wait!” I yelled then. I began to run, legs pumping like Carl Lewis. I ran to the end of the block, hand waving wildly. But it was too late. It was futile. They were out of sight. Gone. Winded, crushed, I turned to walk slowly back to the restaurant parking lot. I had never felt so desolate in my life. I wanted to pray for a miracle, but since I hadn’t prayed much recently, it didn’t seem quite right. I didn’t think it would work, anyway. Kicking the ground like an angry horse, I pulled out my key to unlock the door to the Shorthorn No. 3 and went inside and began to set up tables. There was really nothing else left to do.