We did this constantly in our work in the group. Theater is just group therapy with an audience much of the time, so no one was hesitant about doing it now.

Nothing astonishing came out of that first session, but I hadn't expected it to. What I wanted, and felt after several hours, was their hunger to begin again. Dedication and enthusiasm are important qualities, but what you really want is addiction to the work. No matter what else they're doing, you want them thinking about it day and night like drug addicts. Once you get that, you've started. Not before.

The – of them went out the door arguing about the difference between cancer and Hitler. I said good night but no one heard me.

The next day was errands and a general meeting with the theater group to explain why I had to leave them high and dry right before their first production. It wasn't a pleasant or comfortable scene. All of them knew this could well be their first and last production. They had worked very hard to get it to where it was. How could I just leave them at the –quarter point and waltz out to Hollywood? Didn't I think that was pretty selfish and shitty?

Unfortunately I had no stirring Sydney Carton speech to give about far far better things. I was leaving them flat. Some of them would die before we had time to put up another show. When I asked if they wanted to delay The Visit until I was finished in California, someone laughed nastily and said sure, he'd be happy to delay but would his body?

When everyone had had a say, we all sat there and looked at one another. My eyes filled with tears. I didn't have to look closely to see many of theirs were too.

The garage where I picked up the rental car also had an "exclusive car wash service." While waiting for the papers to be processed, I asked a man how much the car wash cost. One hundred dollars. What did they do for one hundred dollars? Use toothbrushes. On what? Everything, man.

Driving downtown, the thought of men swarming around freshly washed cars with toothbrushes reassured me. A hundred dollars for a car that clean? I'd pay.

It was like those wonderful advertisements on television for toothpaste or vacuum cleaners where decay or dirt are semipersonified into funny/evil cartoon creatures that love to dig holes in your teeth or spread foul muck around the house. Suddenly the Tooth Patrol (fluoride in a police uniform) or Vacuum King comes flashing down like lightning and "kills dead" all the baddies. Where else was good so clear-cut, thorough, and effective?

Racketing through the lights and lead-thick fumes of the Lincoln Tunnel, I fantasized spirits you could hire to come in and give your self a complete cleaning, millions of brushes scrubbing white effervescent foam into every obscure or hidden corner of your soul.

Then I remembered a thought I often had about smoking cigarettes: If there were some kind of wonder pill that would clean your lungs out so they were like new, but in taking it you could never smoke again because you'd die, would you take it?

Inevitably my answer is no. Whether it's clean lungs, car, or soul, what happens when you have to breathe again, knowing the air is full of brown pollution? Or drive the car out of the garage, back into the filthy world? Lungs are prepared to breathe bad air, cars to drive on dirty streets

Maybe souls too were meant for hard wear and rough adventure. To make one "toothbrush clean" was a commendable goal, but unless you planned to live in hermetic seclusion forever afterward, it made little sense.

However, if Phil Strayhorn had done what I thought he'd done with his soul, he was inexcusably wrong. Some part of him decided he liked the taste of dirt (or shit, evil, pain) so he decided to see how much he could eat before exploding. That was the only Faustian element I saw here. Souls are made for rough adventure, but not such alarming and cruel ones. The warnings from Pinsleepe, the sexual Kabuki he'd played for Sasha . . .

Once past a certain point, he didn't want to clean his soul. On the contrary, he wanted it dirtier and dirtier, all along asking, like a child, "Will you still love me if I get this dirty? Yes? This dirty?"

Thinking about these things, I emerged from the tunnel into the afternoon light of New Jersey realizing something important: Magical and haunting as they were, I didn't fully believe what Strayhorn said on those videotapes.

Why should I, knowing only some of the things he'd done before killing himself? Had death given him redemption? It didn't sound like it, according to his plea that I straighten out part of his ongoing mess. He was calm and solicitous, but asking favors.

It reminded me of playing with a Ouija board. If it works, a board can be both disturbing and frightening. But whatever dead spirits you do raise are so easily accessible because they've been condemned to some ominous place between life and death where they are eager to talk to anyone who will listen – much like people in prison who, with so much time on their hands, learn to be both extremely eloquent and patient.

The car I'd rented shivered and shook if I took it over sixty-five, so we eased by the smoke and strong chemical smells of Elizabeth and the white and silver lift of planes taking off from Newark Airport.

It was a long trip to Browns Mills, and I had no idea what I'd find there. But something said it was necessary to go, even if only to spend an hour or two looking around and getting a feel for the place. That invisible smell again.

When Cullen and I had returned to her apartment the other day, I spent an hour talking with Danny about what Strayhorn was like on his last trip east. He had nothing new to add except to describe Pinsleepe in greater detail, but that only agreed with what I already knew.

"Did he say why he was taking her to New Jersey?"

"No, only that she'd asked."

"She asked? That's interesting. Nothing else?"

"Only the name of the place. Browns Mills."

The New Jersey Turnpike is pretty once you get by New Brunswick. There's still a lot of traffic, but it feels like that's where the country begins; if you were to get off at any exit you'd soon see cows or small towns where people were friendly and owned trucks.

I hadn't had anything to eat, so I decided to pull off at the next stop and get a hamburger. What more American a tradition is there than the turnpike rest stop? I don't mean those Mom and Pop pretty-good-food one-shot places somewhere off the interstate that sell homemade pralines. I'm talking about a quarter-mile lean on the steering wheel that curves you into a parking lot the size of a parade ground, fourteen gas tanks, toilets galore, and Muzak. The food can be pretty good or pretty bad, but it's the high-torque ambience of the places that make them so interesting, the fact that no one is really there – only appetites or bladders, while eyes stare glazed or longingly out the window at the traffic. These places differ from train stations or airports because you go to such terminals to leave. A turnpike stop is a break in the flow, the concrete island where you can supposedly rest, tank up, get your bearings, and take a few deep breaths before rushing back out into the pack.

They are particularly American because, although the same kind of stops exist on European highways, there people tend to linger. Real meals are served and enjoyed, white tablecloths and flowers are often on the tables, and people eat slowly and talk. When I was in Europe it struck me the driving, and anything associated with it, was regarded as a good part of a vacation or trip, not just the means to get somewhere.

But I liked the feeling of eating in no-man's-land where you didn't really know where you were except, as the signs said, sixty miles from here or a hundred from there. I liked knowing I was sharing the same experience as every person in the place that day. Where do we have that kind of community? At a movie. At a rest stop. In church.