Dangerous Crossing

In Dangerous Crossing, two long-time friends, Clive and C. Robert, set out from Malibu, CA in a Land Rover, loaded to the roof with most of Clive’s belongings and his two dogs so that Clive, a multi-talented painter, interior designer, TV and Broadway performer, can rent an apartment in Greenwich Village and resume a dreaded but urgently needed job, peddling real-estate insurance in Lower Manhattan. The journey takes them through America’s Heartland and reintroduces them to how exhilarating, illuminating, tacky and exhausting an extended road-trip can be. The two men spend every waking hour joking, challenging, criticizing, arguing and reaffirming every aspect of their lives, their work, their mutual admiration, their triumphs, failures and regrets, seeming to bare all in uproarious, often raunchy exchanges. At each stop for food, gas and lodging, they encounter folks who run the gamut of the American psyche: from the genuinely helpful to the garrulous crank; the shy-of-strangers to the generically mean-spirited and, near the end of the trip, a menacing hitch-hiker. They arrive in NYC on a gray Saturday afternoon, their friendship braised but intact. After helping Clive get installed in his Horatio Street digs, C. Robert flies home to New Orleans, convinced that his friend has settled in comfortably and is back to a remunerative work routine. Pre-dawn, three weeks later, he receives a call from Clive’s sister in Malibu. The shock of her message and the excruciating pain it freights, haunts him to this day.