The last road trip I took with my parents was in 1989.

I was 25. It had been 9 years since I moved out on my own and 10 years since
I’d been on a vacation with my parents.

I knew I wasn’t anything near the rock-n-roll teenager I had been last time we traveled together. I wondered if they were anything like the bickering, bargain hunting, over-eating couple I’d known.

Two minutes into the journey, my questions were answered.

The plan was to spend a week in San Diego, then drive along the scenic Pacific
Coast Highway to L.A., where we would spend another week visiting my brother. To this day, I can’t recall how it was that my parents coerced me into joining them on this vacation, but I assume they used the method that had proved enormously effective throughout my childhood: guilt.

My parents picked me up at the San Diego airport.

“Slovaaaaaa!”

My mother’s Yiddish bellow was far louder than the women making the departure announcements on the intercom.

“Slovah Davida Shana!”

“Hi … Mom!” I said, mortified, praying there was no one I knew on the flight.

My mother sat in the wheelchair she’d used since a stroke two years before. She weaved and bopped and jumped up and down until I couldn’t help thinking of Ray Charles at the piano.

My father as always, stood stoically behind her chewing on something.

I walked to her chair and leaned down to kiss her. She, as always, immediately grabbed the back of my neck and pulled my face down into her ample bosom until I nearly suffocated.

“How was your flight? You didn’t eat any traif, did you?”

“Mom. You know I don’t keep kosher.”

“Shhhh. I’m pretending I didn’t hear that.”

“Are you hungry?” asked my father, still chewing on the mysterious food item he’d been chewing since 1972.

“Yes. Actually, I am. How ‘bout we drive to the beach and eat somewhere on the ocean.”

My mother frowned, opened up her pocket book and dug through a pile of papers.

“I don’t have any coupons for that!” she screamed.

“Mom,” I groaned.

“I have coupons for Wendy’s,” she said.

“Mom. I didn’t fly all the way to California to eat at Wendy’s. I want to eat somewhere I can’t eat at in New York.”

She reached into her bag again and finally after much rustling, looked up with a wide grin on her face.

“We’ll go to Sizzler. I have coupons, and I think they even offer a senior citizen discount.”

“Mom. They have Sizzlers up north.”

“Not like here. They give a California twist to their salad bar. It’s completely different.”

I sighed, knowing I had lost the battle. Instantly, I remembered what every gastronomic experience had been like growing up in my family.

The year they included Hardee World coupons in the tourist magazines was the worst. All five members of my family – Mom, Dad, my brother Mat and sister Lil and I, of course, were sent into every Hardee World we drove by with a dollar-off coupon and 25 cents.

Our mission was to order up to 1.25 worth of food and only have to pay a quarter. If we managed to get our meal for 1.05, we could keep the 20 cents.

No matter how hungry we were that vacation, if there wasn’t a Hardee World in sight, we had to hold out till we got there. Likewise, no matter how stuffed we were, my mother demanded we eat more if a bright orange Hardee World sign lurked two exits away.

Hardee World did a southern spin on the McDonald’s chain, serving mini pecan pies instead of apple turnovers. After that vacation, 10 years passed before I could be in the same room with a pecan.

To this day, the color orange gives me gas.

At the time of our last vacation, I was 25. I had been living in New York City. I was tough, I was gritty, and there was no way a 5-foot-tall, 250-pound 62-year-old in a wheelchair was going to tell me what to eat.

“Go back for more; it’s all you can eat,” she demanded at Sizzler.

“Yes mom,” I said, shoulders slumped down around my hips.

My family had by this point been trying aggressively to get me to leave NYC and move to California. My brother had moved to L.A. three years before, and most of my father’s family lived in Southern California.

The day my parents purchased a house in a suburb of San Diego and put their New Jersey house on the market, I knew the pressure would be on.

They offered to set me up in my own business if I would relocate to California. At first, it sounded tempting: fully finance me in a business venture? But upon further scrutiny, that business was a kosher deli.

“The world can always use good kosher deli,” my mom had said.

“I’m a chef, Mom!”

“What do chefs make? They make food. What do kosher delis serve? They serve food.”

I gave up, remembering a similar fight I’d had with my mother during which she had insisted there was no difference between a writer and a secretary.

“They both type!” she’d screamed.

After being force-fed enough macaroni salad California style, which meant, I suppose, that it had beans in it, it was time to go to our motel.

“Did you book something on the beach?” I asked trying to feel hopeful.

“Close enough,” my father said, still chewing.

“Do they have a pool?” I asked feeling the macaroni churning in my stomach like gasoline.

“I don’t know,” my mother said utterly perplexed at the question. “But they have free breakfast!”

The hotel, as it turned out, was on a highway somewhere outside of San Diego proper. The only things it seemed to be near were a discount clothing store and a gas station. The beach was a 30-minute drive. So was, it would appear, anything one might call attractive.

The place was called the Golden Coach or something like that. It was hard to tell because so many of the letters in the sign were missing. I remember it as the Golden Roach, which it may well have been, for reasons that later became clear.

It did have a pool but it hadn’t been used in about a decade. A swamp-like substance that glowed green filled the cracked orifice that once was a pool. Two young Mexican women lay on lounge chairs near the slime, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer with a straw.

At least I was not forced to share a room with my parents. But my adjacent room had far too little in the way of soundproofing, so not only did I have to hear my parents fight about whether or not Wendy’s gave a senior citizen discount but I also had to hear a couple having loud sex from my other ear. The loud sex couple was far easier to sleep through.

Although the motel was miles from the nearest anything, my parents were impressed with the 50-a-night rate they’d bamboozled and the free breakfast, for them, was the discounted icing on the cheap cake.

“They even have 24 hours of free coffee in the lobby,” my father said, chewing.

Breakfast was served in the lobby, a room painted the color of rust that smelled of roach spray. The breakfast buffet consisted of frozen Lenders bagels, jars of jam and frozen butter pats. I almost dislocated a shoulder attempting to tear open a semi-frozen bagel to stick it in the toaster.

There was bitter coffee in Styrofoam cups and orange juice that tasted like the can from which it had come.

I covered my bagel with jam to kill the freezer burn and sat in the corner so I could get a good view as the Mexican girls poured rum into their coffees.

My parents had already eaten, having awakened two hours early to make sure to get anything that might potentially run out. When I knocked on the door to their room after breakfast … I saw a dozen Lenders bagels and pats of butter on the dresser drawer.

“For later,” my mother said, smiling.

I had a good pal who lived in San Diego, a large woman who cooked for rock concerts. We called her Big Sue, and her earth mama like quality appealed to the rock bands for whom she cranked out southern style comfort food.

“The harder the rocker, the more they love my mac and cheese!” she said last time we spoke.

After enduring two days of fast food and something that crawled into my pillowcase at night and bit my cheek, I told my parents I was going to spend a couple days with Big Sue.

“I’ll meet you back here well in time for the trip to LA,” I said.

Sue pulled into the roach motel in her yellow “Thing” with the license plate that read “MISS THING,” honking like a car in a wedding procession.

My dad sat in the front seat of our car chewing, leaving my mom watching me from her wheelchair in the center of the parking lot. I grabbed my bag and threw it into the back of Big Sue’s Thing. All of a sudden Mom wheeled herself toward me so quickly she nearly sent me flying into the back seat.

“Mom, what is it?”

“Slova,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“Yeah, Mom.”

“Have … fun …”

“I will, Mom. … You, too. Try to do something different.”

I climbed into the jeep and rolled down my window to wave, the guilt creeping into my skin like arsenic.

My mom still sat in the parking lot, staring. I’d forgotten the slate gray hue her eyes took on in sunlight.

She stood up from the chair and walked to the car window. Mom could walk a little bit, but she preferred the attention the chair got her, especially in airports and shopping lines.

She bent down, using the car window to steady herself and whispered. “Take me with you.”

I started to laugh. Mom had always been such a joker, after all, but as Big Sue started the engine and pushed the stick shift into first, I took another look at my mother standing in the parking lot watching us pull away. She’d been watching me drive away for 9 years.

“Your mom is a pisser!” Sue said.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to remember if I’d ever seen that look in my mother’s eyes before. It tugged at me, old and familiar like a question I’d been asked a lifetime ago and had never answered.

Big Sue took me across the border into Mexico where we ate 25-cent fish tacos near Ensenada and spent the night in a hotel on the Baha. From my window I saw dolphins jumping.

When I met up with my parents a few days later, something had changed. My mother seemed more her old self, taking charge of packing up the hotel room, ordering my dad around. She greeted me with a fast kiss and slap on the tush.

“Let’s hit the road!” she said, laughing.

The drive to L.A. was beautiful, even if we could only stop at Burger King’s for free burgers with lettuce tomato and mayo, hold the burger, which was my mom’s way of using her free burger coupons for lettuce and tomato sandwiches.

But I came to understand as we drove along and my mother chatted manically about an assortment of dead relatives, that I’d missed something, a fleeting chance, a window.

“Take me with you.”

I’ve often wondered just what would have happened if I had.