Rearview Mirror by Brad Snyder

Rearview Mirror | Brad Snyder

It was early morning, and the California fog was slowly dancing to the beat of the moonlight. Chris was behind the wheel of our rental car, clutching it with the concentration of a high school student eager to prove he could be trusted to drive. We were the Slow Car, the one that other cars whizzed by on their way to work and, if Californians were anything like our hometown New Yorkers, possibly cussed at under their breath.

It was May 2012 and I was in the back, nestled next to precious cargo: a daughter we’d named Emma, three days old, born on a foreign coast to our surrogate Samantha, who had carried our future for nine months. Who on many nights sat in bed with baby-bump speakers placed against her stomach so our future child could recognize her dads’ voices from our recorded readings of Goodnight Moon and A Fly Went By. Who insisted in the delivery room that Chris and I be the first to hold Emma.

Chris kept his eyes locked on the road.

The winding freeways of that golden state, which darted forward beneath a sprawling system of elevated highways, produced a maze reminiscent of my childhood Hot Wheels sets. It felt at once mammoth and strangely communal, each car filled with people moving along feats of modern engineering like thrill seekers on an amusement ride.

Halfway into our journey, Chris asked me the same question he’d already asked twice since leaving the hospital.

“Is she okay?”

***

I was a senior in high school in 1993, when Pearl Jam released its second album, Vs. While my friends had, by then, sworn allegiance to either Vedder or Cobain or both, I’d not yet found any connection to the grunge rock sounds, three-quarter-length shorts, and long hair coming out of Seattle. To be honest, I felt deserted on Long Island, clinging to the safety and nostalgia of Billy Joel, who once provided the soundtrack for our suburban teenage nights. But by freshman year of college, even as I still played plenty of Billy, something about the change of scenery, about the sudden sense of freedom, produced a shift within me, and the sonic sounds of Pearl Jam came pouring out of my speakers daily.

Though the most popular song on Vs. was “Daughter,” the one that spoke to me like a muse was track eight, “Rearviewmirror.” It began with a repetitive guitar riff, a power chord that carried the promise of an explosive energy to come. After six glorious seconds, a pounding drumbeat and the rest of the band’s guitars propelled the pace into new territory. The rhythm took hold, as if announcing the presence of something sacred.

Then, Vedder, with his longing, mournful, Olympus-like voice, launched the song’s lyrics:

     I took a drive today.

                 Time to emancipate.

***

In the car with Chris and our newborn on the way to the airport for the flight home to New York City, I answered Chris’s question.

“Yes, she’s okay,” I said. That was me pretending to have enough confidence for the two of us.

An hour before, the hospital’s discharge nurse had grown impatient with us as Chris fiddled with the car seat’s installation. Maybe she’d worked the night shift, and our departure was all that stood between her and a break. Maybe she’d expected the two dads would be better at the task. Or maybe she wasn’t much into the idea of two dads. Though all the other nurses had treated us like minor celebrities, jockeying to be in the delivery room, this one, with her furrowed brows and pursed lips, had seemed bothered by everything about us.

When we finally drove away, and there were no more doctors or nurses, we felt the weight of our new and awesome responsibility. Chris’s instinct was to slow down. We’d driven enough on the freeways during previous visits to know that Californians drove fast. We’d also noticed that some drivers took multi-tasking to unusual lengths. Like the woman who propped an open book onto her steering wheel for rush-hour reading at seventy-five miles an hour.

We had seven pounds and two ounces worth of reasons to be cautious.

***

It is said that the riff Vedder played at the beginning of “Rearviewmirror” was among the first guitar parts he’d ever written or played with the band. I didn’t know that then, but it makes perfect sense. There is a majesty to the chords that Vedder strums—they sound innocent and pure and true. Like a first love, or a summer’s night.

Each time I heard the track, whether on my own stereo or someone else’s, I stopped whatever I was doing to let the song’s pulse flow through me. The music felt like breath. It could send me soaring on an imaginary cloud. It could also transport me to the times I watched my high school friends from afar, a distance made greater by the secret of my sexuality I wasn’t yet ready to reckon with. The way my friends would gather around tables filled with red Solo cups overflowing with Pabst or Rolling Rock. The way they sang the lyrics of Pearl Jam’s earliest songs, as though joined by an invisible thread.

 It felt good to understand.

***

The signs pointing us to LAX told us we were almost there.

I looked again at the sprawling lanes of the freeway that dwarfed the expressways of my suburban youth, and marveled at the way the overhead exit ramps seemed to tilt on their axes. There was maybe an order to the chaos. I went through my mental checklist for the cross-country flight home. Like a trial lawyer, I had a folder of legal documents testifying to our child’s relationship to us in the event someone questioned what two men were doing with this tiny baby. I had the American Airlines form a doctor had signed to certify Emma’s fitness to fly at under one-week old, my signature acknowledging a series of far-fetched risks. I had the diaper bag packed with the onesies and diapers and tiny bottles of formula.

Emma was still asleep in her car seat. I offered her the pinky of my right hand by placing it against her tiny knuckles. Just as she had in the moments after her birth when the nurse placed her in the warming bed, and Chris and I stood over her in awe, she grasped my finger.

She held on the rest of the way. 

***

When I was a law student in New York City, I watched the towers burn from my dorm on Mercer Street. A few weeks later, I set out on a road trip from New York City to Michigan to visit my then-boyfriend, Jeremy. I was too fearful about getting on an airplane in the wake of the tragedy, but I needed to find refuge from the city, refuge in Jeremy’s arms. At the time, I was out to some friends but not out to my mom and dad. Something about the smoldering smoke, the posters of the missing attached to fences and lampposts, and the awful smell that none of us wanted to name made my continued hiding feel ridiculous.

So before the trip, I wrote identical letters to my divorced parents letting them know who I really was, using words I was sure I’d never use—how I was gay and how I didn’t want to keep my life a secret from them any longer. Then, on a morning in late September, I stood beneath sunshine in front of a blue street mailbox, knowing that if I worked up the nerve to drop the letters inside, an unstoppable momentum would take hold.

Finally, after a deep exhale twenty-five years in the making, I let go. The metal on the collection slot handle rattled and squeaked as I closed it, a signal there was no turning back. I walked east a few blocks to pick up my rental car.

In those days, my first order of business when entering a car was to prepare the soundtrack. I laid out the stacks of CDs in their jewel cases on the passenger seat with a plan for a steady rotation of my favorites—Billy, Bruce, Greenday, Magnetic Fields, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam among them—for the nine-and-a-half hour drive. I’d taken at least a dozen discs with me, sounds that covered the seasons of my young life. It was an easy ride out of the city through the Holland Tunnel beneath the Hudson River, a route that could sometimes be filled with traffic that made you anxious for daylight. But things were slower in the city—people had left, routines had gone sideways, and nerves made us think twice about where we were going. Soon enough, I’d crossed the Pennsylvania border from New Jersey on the interstate I’d travel for hundreds of miles. 

During the ride, my mind raced with the fear of how my parents might react to my news but also with excitement for a new way of being. It would be at least a day or two until the letters arrived on Long Island. My secret, in a way, was out into the universe though not yet known, creating an in-between that felt both dizzying and intoxicating.

A few hours into the trip, I reached for the Vs. album with my right hand and placed the gleaming disc into the player. The frantic energy of “Go” kicked off track after track that invited me to press the gas pedal closer to the floor. When I hit ninety miles an hour, “Rearviewmirror” came roaring through the car’s speakers. I turned the volume all the way up, and the bass caused everything in the car to rattle.

Then, I looked in my rearview mirror. What would I say if a cop pulled me over at this speed? But I didn’t see any police cars behind me. I saw nothing but empty road and the blurring dashed lines of the highway, proof of my speed and a yearning unleashed. I floored it. The timid Dodge Neon shook like it’d been startled awake. Awake like me. For a moment, I wondered if a car could come apart from being pressed too hard, too fast. But the needle on the odometer beckoned. One more push. And then, I hit 100. I kept it floored there for a euphoric minute.

I’d never driven so fast. It felt electric.

***

As Chris took the exit for the airport, he glanced in the rearview mirror to look at our child. Despite her slumber, she puckered her lips around the pacifier, moving them forward and back like a bird pecking for seeds. Chris’s eyes met mine in the glass. He raised his eyebrows and stretched his lips nervously. It was a gaze filled with anticipation and worry, and also with love. It was a look that bore witness to the little miracle of our lives. In the mirror, we could see many things—the road behind us, yes, but also one another, and our child, too, all captured in the same frame.

We could see that though we’d arrived as two, we were heading home as three.

***

In “Rearviewmirror,” Vedder may be singing about an abusive parent or a love gone wrong or even a version of himself he no longer recognizes. Toward the end, the protagonist is “far away” from someone or something, and the hard-earned distance feels euphoric. Whatever the backstory, the heartbeat of the song can be found in its brief chorus, when Vedder sings of seeing things “clearer” because of what’s appeared in the car’s rearview mirror. There are moments, Vedder is suggesting, when the mirror does more than just let you see what’s behind you.

There are moments when it also lets you see what lies ahead.

Bonus audio of Brad reading from his essay…

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