A rich man once knelt in the dirt of a poor Roma quarter and offered a woman everything he owned.
This is in an old story, “Makar Chudra,” written by Maxim Gorky in 1891, though I first met it as a boy in the film they made of it, “Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven.” A horse thief named Loiko Zobar, and a woman named Rada, both too proud and too free to belong to anyone, least of all to each other. But the part that stayed in me my whole life is the rich man. He loves Rada. He chases her. He brings her gold and clothes and promises, and one day he goes down on his knees in front of her whole neighborhood, everyone watching, and begs. Just name it, he says. The best clothes. All the gold. All my property. My whole fortune. Name the thing you need, and it is yours.
Rada smiles at him. What I need, she says, you don’t have.
Then tell me what it is, the rich man says. I will give you anything.
And she turns, and points at the open road behind her, running out into a wide and gorgeous nothing, and she says: all I need is a road.
That is the whole thing. Not a road to somewhere. A road with no target and no end. No frame, no walls, no owner. It is the one thing the richest man in the story cannot buy, because it was never a thing you buy. I think that is why my people were always in love with whatever moved. Horses first. Then wagons, then trailers, then cars. A house you can pick up and carry, our own shell on our own back, like snails. Slow, and steady, and somehow we reach far.
Gorky wrote that in 1891. Let me take you to 2001.
We all thought the new millennium would be something. New century, clean page, the whole human race about to step forward into something better. Nobody stops to think that forward is not a straight line. Forward goes back, and up, and down, and around. It is a wheel as much as it is a road. And a wheel, the way things go, needs a car. So of course this story from 2001 has a car in it. And of course it has a Roma man in love with that car, the way Loiko loved his horses a hundred and ten years before him.
His name was Ramiz. We became friends fast. He had done a thing almost nobody does: he had snail-ed himself, slow and impossible, all the way from a poor corner of Europe to Beverly Hills, California, and he lived a few blocks off Rodeo Drive. He picked that spot on purpose. Pretty Woman was his favorite film, Julia Roberts his favorite actress, and Rodeo Drive was where they shot it. Every single day he put on his good clothes and walked down that street, half hoping he would turn a corner and there she would be.
I walked it with him most mornings for about three months. He never once ran into Julia Roberts. He ran into Mika instead, another actress, come to Hollywood like ten thousand others to try her luck. Ramiz and Mika together were something to be around. Both vibrant, both a little crazy in the good way, both true believers in miracles.
And Ramiz made one of his own come true: a Mercedes-Benz 320 SL, 2001, his childhood dream in metal. He was so proud of that car. He would dress like a movie star, slide his sunglasses on, get behind the wheel, and drive it through the Beverly Hills sun like he owned the town.
I lived in Sherman Oaks then, and every other morning I would drive over in my own car, a 1991 Honda Civic DX, a clunky thing I loved, to have coffee with him. He worked as a parking attendant behind his own building, and I would pull my little Honda into the lot and park it right next to his Mercedes. The two cars side by side told the whole joke without a word.
One sunny morning, around nine, no coffee in me yet, half my eyes still asleep, I pull in, and the Mercedes is gone. The lot is empty.
First thought: he had to go somewhere. I threw that out fast. Ramiz always called if he was not going to be home on a coffee morning, and he had not called. So I walk up to his door a little uneasy, and through it I can hear loud, happy music and my friend singing his heart out.
Now I am confused. Mika is there, the music is going, the man is joyful, and his dream car is missing from the lot. He opens the door, hugs me, glad to see you, coffee is already brewing on the table. A few sips in, he tells me about his night.
Around three in the morning, dead asleep, Ramiz hears a sound. Not just any sound. He knows the exact purr of that Mercedes engine the way you know your own child crying in the dark. He is up and out of bed before he is even awake, out of the building and into the street in his Tom and Jerry underwear, chasing the man who is driving his baby away. Stop, he is yelling. Please, stop.
And the man stops.
Ramiz comes up to the window, out of breath, polite as anything, and asks: could you please hand me my favorite jacket. It is on the back seat.
The man looks at Ramiz. He looks at the Tom and Jerry underwear. He turns around, reaches into the back, finds a good leather jacket, grabs it, and throws it out the window to Ramiz. Then he drives off in the Mercedes.
So that is the story of the night, I say. Ramiz nods, proud, glowing, a man who got his jacket back.
Here is what I learned standing in his kitchen that morning, and I have kept it my whole life. However bad the thing is that happens to you, there is almost always something good sitting inside it. The only real question, the only choice you actually get, is which part you decide to hold up to the light.
Ramiz knew this in his body. He had had a good run, good enough to buy the car he had wanted since he was a boy. Then the run turned, the way runs turn, and soon he could barely fill the tank, never mind the payments. He knew the car was going. He had known for a while. But he also knew exactly the one thing he would not lose: the leather jacket he had snail-ed all the way from Europe to Beverly Hills, the shell he carried on his own back. And he knew a man could drive off with a Mercedes but not with Mika, and that he could no more drive away from her than she from him.
And this is the thing I only understood later, watching him sing over that coffee. The freedom was never in the car. It never is. Rada’s rich man learned it on his knees, and the repo man learned it behind the wheel, and both of them ended up owning everything except the one thing that mattered. You can repossess the car. You cannot repossess the road. That was the whole philosophy of a wise man in Tom and Jerry underwear, one hot Beverly Hills summer, and it took me years to catch up to him. The Mercedes was only ever a nicer horse. Ramiz still had the road, still had his shell, still had his Mika. Of course he was singing. What was there to cry about? They had taken the least important thing he owned.
Not long after, my friend snail-ed his way back home to Europe. No Mercedes this time. But the leather jacket was on his back and Mika was in the seat beside him, first class on a Boeing 747, the two of them flying home like the stars they always half were, ready to keep rolling through the cycles like a boss.
Because that is all it is, in the end. All any of us needs. Not the gold, not the car, not the man on his knees with his whole fortune in his open hands. Just the road, with no end to it, as wide as the sky is over it. The shell on your back. And someone worth carrying it beside.
All I need is a road, some wheels on it, and a good shell. And I will snail on like a boss.