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Authors: Jason Kersten

Journal of the Dead (5 page)

His father eventually gave him a push. According to a close friend, the two had a minor run-in over Dave’s future—or lack thereof. He needed a plan, or at least his own place. He couldn’t just go traipsing off to Boston every other night and come slinking back in the wee hours to the Coughlin Inn. Even though he’d expected it, his dad’s criticism had stung, first because he thought he’d been making the best of it, and second because he knew his old man was right. He could do better.

So he moved out of the house and in with a friend of his, Keith Goddard, who worked at a local gas station. They got an apartment in the nearby town of Millis, and if Dave still wasn’t sure where he was going, at least he was independent. Things slowly got better for him. He settled into his job at the town hall, where he was extremely well liked. He’d take whatever offhand projects needed work, and often put in long hours. One of his biggest inspirations had come just a few months before leaving. The town hall wasn’t exactly the most technologically savvy place, and his boss,
Arnold Wakelin, asked him if there was anything they could use to streamline the annual town meeting.

“He brought in a laptop computer and did a Power Point presentation,” says Wakelin. “It was the slickest thing. There he was running the whole thing from this little computer. He was a smart, resourceful kid.”

They promoted him after that, and got him a raise. It wasn’t much, but he had begun to find his place. He talked about staying at the town hall for a long time, if only he could find a way to secure a position less at the mercy of a city council budget.

A friend of Dave remembers that one day he showed up at his house with a videotape, coolly put it into the VCR, and grinned proudly as he watched himself jumping out of an airplane, tied tandem to another skydiver.

“I was blown away,” said the friend. “He never once mentioned that he wanted to skydive. But he was like that. He didn’t talk much about doing things, he’d just do them.”

California was the same way. When he took a week off work in May of 1999, he told his coworkers at the Town Hall he was going out west on vacation, but it was, in fact, a well-planned scouting expedition.

He’d heard about the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management through some of his old professors and classmates. It was a brand-new school, attached to the University of California at Santa Barbara, and its two-year master’s program promised the kind of hands-on, field-oriented training that got students jobs. The fact that it was fifty yards from the beach,
housed in a space-age building surrounded by palm trees, didn’t hurt, either.

But there were some catches: to be eligible for the program, he needed to establish California residency first, which meant that he’d have to live in the state a year before starting classes. There was also money. His parents could help him out a little, but he’d still need to work and save as much as possible. He talked it over with his dad, who suggested that he fly out and take a look. He caught a flight out west on May 18, booking it in the evening so he could catch the afternoon opening of
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

Coughlin didn’t go to California on his scouting expedition alone; Kirsten Swan, who had relatives there, went with him. She and Raffi had moved into an apartment together on Boyleston Street, not far from Fenway Park, but as often happens with college romances, they grew apart after graduation. During the rougher patches of her relationship with Raffi, Swan had occasionally turned to Coughlin for advice and consolation, and by the time she and Raffi finally broke up, she and Dave were closer than ever.

I’ll distance myself from her if you want, Dave told Raffi, but Raffi said he didn’t have a problem with it. Coughlin, after all, had known her first, and the breakup was amicable. Raffi moved into an apartment in West Roxbury, and he and Kirsten had agreed not to see each other until they’d both moved on emotionally. By the end of 1998, they were all hanging out together again, as friends, and the three of them even took a trip down to Philadelphia in December to spend New Year’s with Raffi’s family and watch the annual Mummers Parade, a rollicking procession of twenty-five thousand costumed celebrants that’s Philly’s answer to Mardi Gras. Raffi’s sister, Melanie, would take a memorable photo that day; in
it the three of them lean into the street as if blown back by a happy wind. Raffi and Kirsten fill the foreground while Dave peeks out from behind Kirsten’s hair with smiling eyes.

In California, the only ones in the picture would be Dave and Kirsten, but Raffi knew about the trip and so did Dave’s girlfriend, Sonnet Frost, and neither of them voiced any concern. Dave and Kirsten had been good friends—and nothing more—for as long as they could remember. She would be an assuring anchor for him as he surveyed the palmy landscape and tried to envision how his future would play out there. And sometime during that week, as the two toured the Western Riviera and talked it over, Dave tasted a life he wanted more of.

He came back a week later and immediately gave notice at the town hall. The dream of the West had caught him. In two months he was moving to California.

Packing up his car, quitting his job, and speeding off toward the setting sun was precisely the type of the adventure Raffi would approve of, and Dave immediately suggested he come along for the drive. “God willing, I’ll get the chance to do it again,” were the ending words to Kodikian’s
Globe
article, and now here was that chance, with his best friend. But Raffi wasn’t as free as he’d been back in the summer of ’97.

I can’t, he told Coughlin. I have no vacation time left.

It was agonizing, because Dave’s offer came right when Raffi felt as if he was spinning his wheels, and looking for his own next move. Thirty years ago, Raffi’s starting point after college might have been one of Boston’s large newspapers, the
Globe
or the
Herald,
but a bachelor’s degree in journalism—or even a master’s degree—carries little weight these days when it comes to landing a starting position at a first-tier publication. Major newspapers almost never hire anyone without at least five years of experience, no matter how educated they are. After graduation, the only way Kodikian could have worked in journalism would have been if he left Boston for a smaller market, which would have meant leaving his girlfriend, the town he loved, and many of his friends. Instead, he took a job in the correspondence department of Massachusetts Financial Services, one of the biggest corporations in Boston. After an adventure on the road that he shared with hundreds of thousands of readers, he had found himself writing letters to people curious about mutual funds. After two years, it was taking a mind-numbing toll, and he was eager for new direction.

To get things moving, he cut off his ponytail and met with Jerry Morris, the
Boston Globe
editor who had worked with him on his road-trip piece two years earlier. “He was not at all happy with where he was,” Morris said of their meeting in the Globe’s cafeteria. “He wanted to quit his job and become a travel writer. He took lots of notes. He sounded serious about it. He later e-mailed me that he was thinking of doing a story about a cruise on the Great Lakes. He never pitched any other stories. He was taking notes during our whole conversation. He even taped our conversation.”

Morris warned Kodikian about some of the pitfalls of travel writing, mainly that it pays almost nothing, especially for beginners. Kodikian had been paid about $350 for his road-trip story, which translates into about 8 cents a word. Newspapers are infamously cheap when it comes to paying freelancers. Magazines, on
the other hand, pay anywhere between 50 cents to $2.50 per word, and at one point Kodikian also arranged an interview with an editor at
Boston Magazine,
John Marcus, who had talked to one of his classes at Northeastern.

“He mentioned wanting to write something in the spirit of
On the Road,”
remembered Marcus, “I told him, well, that’s the story that every kid just out of college wants to write, so he’d be better off pitching something else.”

Moving was also another option Kodikian was mulling over. He told his friend Jonathan Pape, who he had interned with at the
Globe,
that he was thinking about heading off to Denver—the same town that Sal Paradise, the character that Kerouac based on himself, is inexorably drawn to in
On the Road.
But unlike Coughlin, he had not reached a decision.

If Raffi couldn’t accompany Dave on his adventure, he could at least help him plan it, and the two mapped it out over beers and games of pool. The route Dave decided on ended up being almost identical to the one Raffi had taken in ’97, a swing through the South.

A week before Dave was to leave, Raffi, Kirsten, Sonnet, and a few of his other friends took him out for a going-away dinner at an Italian restaurant in Boston’s North End. It was a bittersweet occasion, as Dave realized that he wouldn’t be seeing his friends for a long time. He fought off the sentimentality by rallying around the adventures he would have on his trip west. Raffi listened while Dave talked about visiting Graceland, New Orleans, and Austin. The excitement in his friend’s voice piqued his wanderlust.

What the hell, he told Coughlin. I’ll ask for some time off. At
such short notice, it’s a long shot, but they might just let me take some unpaid leave.

A few days later, he called Dave at the town hall. He had talked his supervisor at MFS into letting him go.

“David was ecstatic when Raffi called to say he was coming with him,” said one of Coughlin’s coworkers. “He put the trip off two weeks just so Raffi could come.”

4

T
he friends reached the outskirts of Philadelphia at about ten o’clock. Since Boston, there had been “traffic out the yin-yang,” Kodikian would later write, but the congestion of the seaboard’s weekend traffic dissolved as they passed the city and approached their first night’s destination: Raffi’s hometown of Doylestown, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Bucks County has some of the greenest land in America. It lies about fifteen miles northwest of Philadelphia, in a region filled with luscious farms, riparian forests, rolling hills, six wineries, and twelve covered bridges that give Madison County, Iowa, a run for its money. Every fall, newspapers and magazines all over the Mid-Atlantic pick it as one of the top places to see fall foliage, and tourists from across the country drive through by the thousands, charmed by hot-colored elms and dogwoods. The county was originally named after Buckinghamshire, England, which has a similar
terrain, but it’s a running joke in Pennsylvania that the name comes from all the money of its residents.

Doylestown sits right in the middle of the county. Like Wellesley, the town is prime real estate; the houses along its wooded lanes represent some of the highest average home values in the state. Its citizens, too, have strategically embraced their main street, shoveling out the funds to replace cement sidewalks with brick and granite promenades, restoring it to the exact moment it arrived at the Norman Rockwell nexus. On Main Street, the refurbished County Theater hawks era movies such as
Rebel Without a Cause
in bright red letters, while parking meters still charge a quarter. The town is filled with art galleries, antique shops, bed-and-breakfasts, fine restaurants, and Victorian-era architecture. It’s easy to see at least part of the reason why David and Raffi were friends; exchange the Charles River with the Potomac, switch Boston with Philadelphia, and you almost have the same town.

Like Dave’s father, Raffi’s is a businessman. When people in Doylestown need to rent something—party supplies, Halloween costumes, power saws, almost anything—they go to his dad’s store, Rental World. Harold Kodikian, or “Hal,” as he likes to be called, played his cards right. He opened up his first store in the nearby town of Lansdale back in the early seventies, and now runs two branches. When people come into the store, they recognize Hal by his gray, well-trimmed beard, falconlike brow, and the same dark and penetrating eyes he passed on to his son. Raffi’s mom, Doris, is of slight build, with short gray hair and a warm smile.

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