Metamorphosis

Posted by MEATGRINDER on Thursday, November 23, 2006 · Leave a Comment

I made my escape after 5 hardcore days of my VA Beach friends trying to give me liver cancer and even though every part of me just wanted to get back on the road I was torn. It was hard to say goodbye to the friends and places. Memory is a dirty liar when it comes to things like this, and for some reason even though I was haunted by the experiences of a life that was gone, there was a part of me that didn’t want to leave. I met Colin on my last day in town, he helped me load kit bags and cruise boxes full of equipment into the back of my Uhaul. I took him out to breakfast and we sat there on good old Shore drive drinking smoothies and eating egg sandwiches. I had planned on making a good run of it on my first day, hit the road hard and put some serious miles between me and the Atlantic, but precious minutes were slipping away as we just sat and bullshitted for hours.

Conversation finally drew to a close and I hit the road. I drove hard north. I was gonna try and make Chicago that first day so I could go out at some of the old bars and clubs and shit I used to frequent in another life but it wasn’t in the cards. The Pennsylvania turnpikes fucked me all up and by the time I pulled my head out of my ass I had murdered too much time to make it. I pulled off the road at truckstop hell somewhere in the pinetree maze.

While the Uhaul is slowly filled with liquefied dinosaur bones I wander over to a crusty old man standing behind a large pickle barrel. Wearing an old pale blue mesh trucker hat so old it was probably bought back when those things were first in fashion and it looks like he hasn’t taken it off since. His face looks like one giant scar. Tan, weathered, didn’t move like flesh. More an animated collection of cracks. I stood there for a moment staring into the murky depths of the barrel.

Leatherface “Thems’ th’goodn’s they’s”

I look into the barrel at the pungent green liquid suspending what look like bright red pickles.

Me “What the hell is that?”

His flat brown wrinkled hand reaches into the barrel. I watch as the thin blue veins slowly dip into the green stuff until they emerge clutching their prize. The man holds the bright red thing like a cigar, raises it to his face, then bites the end off with the side of his mouth.

“Pickled sausage” he says as bits of pickled red meat are mashed between his teeth.

I take a deep breath, look into the barrel one more time.

“I’ll take three!”

… and they were delicious.

With the pickled sausages in my guts and the gas in the car I was ready to rock on. Snaking my way through the Appalachians I pushed hard into the night until finally burning out in Toledo, Ohio. I pull into a nowhere motel and rent a room for 25 bucks from a creepy dark haired girl that smells like mothballs and has deep black rings under her eyes. I back the Uhaul against a wall so that it wont get broken into while I catch a few winks. Feeling jittery from the long drive I wander the hotel grounds in a daze. The place was a trainwreck. A small swimming pool lay partially drained in a half-hearted attempt to keeping the long hauls from drowning trucker whores in it. Three mattresses were stacked neatly nearby. Moldy, smelly, half soaked in rainwater and piss and god knows what else. I lumber over to a liquor store to get some cash and some new batts for my GPS. As I step into the ass-rape mini-mart the smell of incense and sulfur hangs heavy in the air. I hit up the ATM and grab some supplies. The skinny bald white dude behind the counter looks like he’s been living off diet pills and satanism for the past 10 years. The guy has no upper lip, 25 silver hoops in his right ear, and tiny grey teeth that defy the existence of modern dentistry. The neon signs outside buzz in the cold air. The man looks like he’s snarling as his bottom lip does all the work. The total comes to $6.66 and I wonder if I’m not about to be Punk’d or something, but nothing happens. Its just another shithole liquor store in another shithole town. I make my way back to the hotel and slam my door shut only too late to realize that the thing is only being held in place by grime and luck. The hinges and deadbolt have all been kicked in and repaired a hundred times in what is probably a long history of drug busts and jealous confrontations.

I wanted to get up early but the constant rhythm of trucks driving by on the interstate sing me into a deep sleep. I wake up late the next morning to a freezing rainy day. I drive over to “Brandy’s Diner” after promising myself a real meal before I charge into another day of gas station food. The place was a box. As soon as I walk in a fat man warmly tells me that I can sit wherever I want. He doesn’t look like he really works here but I say “thanks” all the same and find a seat near the large front window facing the street. ‘Rick’ is the name on his gas station nametag. The guy looks completely at home in this diner. His face was like a pink throw pillow. Fat, yellow teeth, talking non-stop from the minute I enter the restaurant to the minute I leave. The place is tiny so its impossible for me to not overhear everything that he says. He babbles on about industrial chemicals, employment trends, he even seems to know a hell of a lot about a psychic pig that lives somewhere nearby, but what he is an absolute expert on is pie. I had no idea that there was so much to talk about when it comes to pie. The size of the pie, the size of the slice, the taste, the amount of fruit, the amount of crust, the amount of glaze, the price, the freshness, how long it was cooked for. I swear that this dude must be the all time master of pie knowledge. He knew all the best places in town, confidently compared the prices of different restaurants various flavors as well as qualities. He had a fancy statement to conclude each of his points. The only one that really stands out in my mind is when Rick stated with absolute authority “Now THAT was a tasty pie!” I had this sense on a spiritual level that that pie must have really been something special. Unfortunately, Rick was about the only thing in the diner that wasn’t creepy. The place was painted lime green. The walls were covered with paper mache pumpkins and ceramic figurines of angels. Everyone in the diner was wearing American flag shirts, or ballcaps, or jackets, or pants. One woman had a blue denim floppy hat with no less than 50 pins. Each one a little flag, or an eagle, or POW/MIA. Everyone in the there was missing at least one tooth, so I didn’t feel so bad as I popped my tired retainer out and set it on the table. One pale skinny girl was meticulously spreading jam on ½ inch squares of her toast then carefully biting them off. Another man was taking these little mini-sips of his coffee then sticking his tongue out repeatedly in what looked like disgust. The mini sips couldn’t have been more than a few drops. It must have taken him a month to drink just one cup, disgusting from start to finish. One large window was the main source of light. As I sat there with my back to the window watching the people, every five minutes a big rig would drive past. For a few seconds the place goes dark and conversations stop. Everyone looks out the window to see the truck pass by but then they would all look at me. I felt like an insect on a pin. Then the truck passes, light returns, and the people continue their conversations.

I ordered the ‘country breakfast’:

3 eggs
3 pieces of bacon
toast
home fries
and coffee

grand total = $3.50

As it turns out there was nothing on the menu over five bucks. Today’s specials included baked pork chop, fried chicken, hot roast beef sandwich and potatoes, shrimp and steak. As soon as the last crumb of food was slurped off my plate I threw down some cash and booked it.

With the coffee running its course I motivate to stop at an antique mall. Remarkably I find a few treasures that will grace my possession until the end of time.

Original newspaper from the day after JFK was assassinated – 5$

6 inch thick leather bound scrap book that someone kept from 1930 through 1970 – 20$

August 1988 LIFE magazine featuring Pee Wee Herman ‘How to throw the coolest party ever’ – 2$

I load my treasures into the cab of the Uhaul and get back on the interstate. I burn through the rain. It’s time to put some more miles on this trip. The solitude of the car starts to turn my gears. I feel homeless, rootless, without direction. I can’t drive towards one relationship without driving away from another. I’ve been a hunter gatherer all my life and now for the first time I’m starting to suffer for it. I burn through a whole tank of gas and pull off to refuel and grab some maps. The fat dude at the counter is almost a body double for fat Rick back in Toledo.

Fat clone, mockingly “You don’t even know where your goin’!?”
Me “Well if it was to the buffet I’m sure you could give me directions.”

I press on down the interstate until I come across what’s being advertised as the 8th wonder of the world; FIREWORKS! I keep telling myself that experience is more important than wealth, well its time to prove it. I drop 165 bucks on the box labeled “Black Avenger”. I instantly befriend the people in the store who with absolute confidence agree with me that ‘fireworks are the fucking coolest thing EVER’. The people were so satisfied that they had just had a completely masturbatory transaction with a fellow fire-starter that they went deep into the store and came back with a gift for me. The blue rocket. Basically a gigantic fucking rocket that explodes blue flame all over the sky. It was time for me to rekindle my pyromaniac youth. What better way to express my disapproval of meaningless material gain than to blow a bunch of cash on shit that just blows up. The fireworks store is a symbol. It is a metaphor for life, man’s plight. This is it, right now. This is life and its not gonna happen if you just stay on the interstate. The whole point is not the destination but it’s the journey. The grail is not what is important whether it’s a cup or a woman, but the quest is what is relevant. The quest. And its how you act while on the quest, the decisions you make, that define your true character. I am a knight on a holy quest. This roadtrip is my quest, this Uhaul is my trusty steed, and the prize is my soul (or maybe just to blow some shit up along the way). I pull over to throw the fireworks in the back of the truck. As I pull open the door I see that the load has shifted. Some things have broken back there, some things are upside down, but it has found its own natural order, its own equilibrium. With the addition of the fireworks that equilibrium has again shifted. The future is again unclear. This is what the roadtrip is supposed to be about. I’m finding things out. I’m discovering things and I’m changing because of it. Time to get back on the interstate.

You gain proficiency in a whole new skill set when driving for extended periods of time. You could even call them ‘road trip skills’ because they are unique to people who live in their cars. Alternately they are totally present in everyday life in Los Angeles, but I think that may be the exception that proves the rule or whatever. Knee on wheel, redbull in one hand, jerkey in mouth, typing a text message in the other hand, taking a picture out the window, writing down a few notes, and changing the playlist on your iPod all at once. These are the road trip skills and with enough practice you can truly become a master.

I pull over a few hours later and accidentally find myself in front of another roadside anomaly. “The Pickle Factory”, an entire store dedicated to pickles. I have a brutal flashback to the red pickled sausages back in Pennsylvania and start to wonder if this is some kind of bizarre unconscious theme in my brain that is only now, out here on the road, being revealed. Regardless, I roll into the Pickle Factory to check the place out. Pickles assault my every sense. The woman running the store turns out to be the nicest lady on planet earth. Big awkward glasses, salt and pepper hair, thick puffy sweater. Answers all my stupid questions about the store, the company, the pickles and about a hundred other things. I tell her about just coming back from Iraq and taking a cross country road trip to clear my head. She tells me that her son was killed in Iraq about a year ago. I watch her face very carefully. Her delicate smile crumbles before my eyes and she has a far off look. The color recedes from her cheeks and her eyelids sag slightly. Her head hangs down if but only an inch and yet having the effect of her posture like she had been hauling 200 pounds of rocks all day. I feel like an invisible hand reached into my chest and squeezed my heart as hard as it can and wont let go. His name was Ryan, she asks me if I, by chance, knew him. Obviously the answer was no.

I load up on 20 dollars worth of pickles and stuff before heading back to the interstate. Its misty, drizzling. Farms and churches are everywhere, the spirit of many hands working together. I wanted to take as many pictures as possible, I remember Brad’s statement “Pictures, pictures, pictures” but I’m caught up in more than just the picture. I’m caught up in the message. And right now the message is more important than the picture.

long metal watering booms stretched across fields
blue/gray metal grain silos with orange rust spilling down out of every seam
an American flag painted onto a barn door
trailor parks
semi trucks
prefab homes
truckstops
rusty barbed wire fences whose legacy stretches back in history to when the west was won
flannel jackets
rotting cars
dead wooden barns, sagging, being swallowed up by the earth
billboard signs advertising sporting goods stores and motor homes
tan, tightly cropped stubble out of a dark brown earth
smooth streams that reflect barren branches
burned out homes with caved in roofs slowly imploding under the weight of moss. This is the chaos theory of the American dream.

I try and let go of what’s holding back my emotions. I want to feel everything. I’m teaching myself how to be human again, maybe for the first time.

cops on the side of the road focused on their radar guns
sagging powerlines that cut through trees and across fields into the horizon
every 30 miles a little white cross on the side of the road sometimes with a little bow or some plastic flowers tied to it
the smell of wood fires

Every time a rock flies off the back of a semi truck or the Uhaul’s engine cuts because the governor detects 90mph my heart stops. For a split second my blood runs cold and then instantly I recover. The car is not blown up. A rocket did not hit the car and neither did an IED or EFP or any other damn thing. I won the war. I won the war because I survived. I won the war and I’m never going back to Iraq.

I pull over in Gary Indiana. This is what I’ve been looking for. This is a post-industrial town in utter shambles. A titanic steel works is the main attraction. Initially I wanted to get photos of the works, its huge plume of white smoke groping high into the sky, but the town was so utterly abandoned, so completely downtrodden, so totally derelict that I was instantly enamored with everything except the works. This is a broken glass town where shattered windows are boarded up only if they’re lucky. Row after row of abandoned storefronts, each one completely smashed in. The only operational businesses are fried chicken fast-food and payday advance loans, wig stores and video rentals. The people here move slowly, everyone looks tired. People waiting for busses, crossing the street against the signal. Expressions are deliberate, gestures methodical and deep in meaning. Freight trains rumble by constantly, the sky is yellowish gray and the ground is black, the soil has been smothered completely with coal dust. I am the only white person, but the fact that I’m carrying a camera, my clothes aren’t ripped and worn, and I’m not wearing any gold jewelry would be enough by themselves to make me stand out. I make my way past the deterioration and detritus until I find a giant burned out rail station. Must have been built about a hundred years ago, the huge stone and brick structure looking like the skeleton of a dinosaur there by the train tracks. A once powerful thing, massive, intimidating, but now absolutely in ruins. It was beautiful. I spent thirty minutes snapping away on my camera. I even dug an old brick out of the coal dirt and took it back to the Uhaul with me. Took a piss on it before I left to mark my territory.

Check out the pictures I snapped off right here.

Back on the interstate, next stop Chicago. The town brings back a lot of old memories. My drunken street fighter days. Pre-seal teams. People are impatient here, intentionally chic, street savvy in their mid-west metropolis. I could live here if I had to. I quickly snake my way through traffic until I hitch up the Uhaul a block away from what used to be one of the best punk stores in the world. The decentralization of product sourcing through the internet has made places like this somewhat obsolete. Culture no longer flows from one physical geographic locale any more but is sprinkled homogeneously everywhere at once. This waters down the message, waters down the effect, and means that ideas have to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The city moves at its own pace, get up to speed or get out of the way. This is not the idea of this trip, I can’t be told what to do, where to go, and how fast to get there. Fuck the oppression of this modern life. This trip is about reversing the flow of the river, if only for a little while. I grab a couple t-shirts and escape to the south. I have begun my sojourn along Route 66. Already tired and dirty I have no idea where this trip may take me, but I am ready.

I drive hard south. Joliet is my next stop, hoping to find more of the post-industrial leprosy that has left barren neighborhood and abandoned factory in its wake. The place is nothing like what I was hoping for. All the grime and ghetto glory that was so apparent in Gary is nowhere to be found here. Joliet is a total bust. If I wanted to hang out in strip malls and burger shacks then I’d just have gone to fucking Anaheim. I loop around town for a while until completely disappointed I get back on the interstate. Night has fallen like a severed head. Fog drapes the road and for the next fifty miles I press through it with near-zero visibility. The numbing gray vapors slowly coat the car in moisture until the small droplets join together and run down the windshield. In the few random moments when I emerge into a gap in the misty prison and the fog is clear for a few moments I take in the dramatic sight of…. Nothing. I am truly in the middle of fucking nowhere. There are no other cars on the road, the fog is keeping everything pressed right up against my face, and when it clears I realize that there is nothing around me except a vast barren expanse of cold dead earth.

The fuel light blinks on and I pull off in Normal to fuel up. I roll into the gas station, start the pump, and go inside the mini-mart to piss and load up on supplies. I grab a couple Sprite Zero’s hoping that they will fill me up enough to not eat another 50 fucking hot pockets and beef jerky tonight. I can already feel my body transforming into something fat and useless. A cop comes in as I’m getting rung-up. The checkout dude looks at him and says “Good evening officer Barney” then turns to me with a smirk as the cop passes by. I sit there waiting for the green plastic bottles to pass under the red laserbeam. The glowing red eye blinks on the bar code and the machine’s brain beeps with recognition.

“I hate pigs” I say. I don’t even know where that comes from. I mean, I know where it comes from because I hate pigs, but it was something else. It was me playing the part of the sideburns tattoo guy at the gas station who hates cops and wants to act cool by saying so to the pimply faced loser checkout clerk. God I am such a fucking faggot sometimes.

I look up at the clerk as his pale white and red speckled face drops and I just know that I’m fucked. I turn around and the little buzz-cutted pig is puffing up one foot behind me. I smile “hey man” I say. His face is starting to turn pig red and his beady little pig eyes are falling deeper and deeper into pig rage. I grab my Sprite Zero’s and walk out. I stand there by my Uhaul pretending to pump gas until he leaves so he can’t follow me and fuck me on some driving violation shit. I finally pull out and do a few loops through town to check the place out. It is as advertised, normal. I hate towns like this. Places like this make the scars on my knuckles itch. I roll through a supermarket to scoop up some stuff the gas station didn’t have and every eye in the place tracks on me the entire time like a dozen fleshy security cameras. Even the college kids don’t know what to make of me. I can feel the rage building up. Like that pig back at the gas station. My rage stems from the fact that I am an outcast everywhere I go. I never fit in, especially not here in Normal. I am anything but normal and somehow my presence here has disturbed some cosmic balance. I am that little spot of black in the white swirl in the yin-yang. I have to get out of this shithole before someone offers me bong rips or a bible and I have to murder every last one of these fucking sheep.

I wake up the next morning not knowing exactly where I am. I popped some sleeping pills the night before to take the edge off the long hours on the road and it had splashed bleach on my memories. I stumble out of the hotel into the restaurant next door. The Hen House. Nine booths all single occupied with wayward travelers such as myself. I take the last empty booth in the back to the left. An overweight ruddy faced woman in the opposite booth is continually hacking and coughing through advanced lung disease. I order the ‘harvester’.

2 eggs
2 sausages
home fries
pancakes – I request peanut butter for these.

Antique farm tools cover the walls and the furniture is all thick and wooden. The caffeine and sleeping pill combo when piled on top of many hours of driving have left me groggy and unmotivated. I sit there watching a mini swirling galaxy of cream in my steaming black coffee. I am in a trance. My mind wanders out of my body and looks down on my current state in tired disgust. I am starting to come apart, starting to show the worn through parts of my soul. Too many trips to Iraq, too many hours on the road, too many beers and too many pills. The hacking woman’s phlegmy call jerks me from my meditation.

My meal is served, kechup, Tabasco, and peanut butter applied to their respective foods. One quick slurp chased by a large gulp and it was all gone. Four women come in and sit in one of the middle tables. They are clucking about election results, air conditioners, the grooming and training of dogs, as well as a number of other equally life changing topics. One woman continually says “especially these days” to add final emphasis to her specific argument on the previously listed topics. Now I see why they call this place the hen house. All the regulars file in as the travelers file out. Pretty soon the place is full of 40-60 year old women wearing sleeveless fleeces and sweaters over turtlenecks and long sleeve denim shirts. All overweight and in varying degrees of graying hair. All just clucking away.

“especially these days” cluck cluck cluck

“oh well, you know” cluck cluck cluck

“that’s too bad, that’s just too bad” cluck cluck cluck

“well I really feel sorry for her, really I do” cluck cluck cluck

“that’s what you get when you don’t do what’s proper” cluck cluck cluck

“oooh, that is sooo nice” cluck cluck cluck

I find myself running to my Uhaul to get away. The fucking banality almost made my soul throw up on itself. This place should be hit with a neutron bomb. I’m back on the interstate before I even know what’s happening. Peddle pressed to the steel, barely awake, stomach full of hot food and coffee causing my forehead to start to sweat. My eyes are covered in dead bugs and my mouth tastes like road salt and in my hair dead strips of long haul truck tires lay abandoned like alligator skins. Middle America, this is Bush country, these are the red colored states in the election. I’m driving through the red.

About an hour down the road I snap out of my road trance as my guts start to revolt all at once. I’m 2 seconds away from shitting my life and there isn’t a pull-off for another 10 miles. Sweat beads up and starts to run down my face. I lean forward, groan, turn the radio off, roll the windows down. “Shhh.. ooh.. SHIT!!?!” I feel a single cold drop of sweat roll excruciatingly slowly all the way from the back of my neck down my spine. The gas pedal slams home, the vehicle lurches forward in a panic. I pull into the Pilot gas station and truck stop like a meteorite, the transmission clicking fearfully as ‘D’ becomes ‘P’ while still doing 30mph. I stumble anxiously past a small army of realtree ballcaps bobbing around on top of dirty angry heads. Something gurgles up inside of me like an office water cooler that randomly takes a large gasp of air. I shuffle past the coin-op showers where a fat greasy trucker is dragging a gangly worn out hooker with a bad case of acne behind the dented steel door. She looks at me as I trundle past, our eyes meet for a moment and there is some kind of strange connection. Past the thick circle of black smudged eye make-up, through the ring of pale blue wreathed in white and red, into the black and bottomless hole in the middle. She is asking and telling all at once and for just a split second I forget about the toxic waste burning a hole through my ass. Then a cramping pain seizes up my bowels just as the trucker figures out the latch and she is yanked into the small white cell. The moment is broken.

I barely have my pants down before my guts explode out of me into the porcelain bowl. Technically I had shit my pants. Don’t get me wrong here, no shit in any way shape or form was crapped into my jeans, but at the moment when I did crap it was in no way my choice or under any form of control. I shit my pants but luckily I had just pulled them out of the way in time and was squatting over the toilet. I sit down with relief as a hundred curly trucker pubes and errant half-dried piss drops stuck to my sweating ass. There was no time to put the seat down and I sat there beyond caring against the cool white rim.

After cleaning up I walk back out of the stall. A massive man with a white beard standing in front of a urinal is hauling his huge gut up. Kneading it with his forearms so that his hands are left free to zip his pants up and fasten his belt. The tattooed names of lost loves and his poor departed mother pressed tightly against parts of his abdomen that he hasn’t seen in years. When he is finished he releases his belly in an avalanche of flesh and lets out a tired sigh. I hear a horrible thumping and muffled whimpers coming from the now locked coin-op shower stall as I walk back into the gas station. I spy a stack of ‘radioactive’ stickers used on the sides of semi’s on my way out the door and decide to scoop a few up. As I pay, the cashier starts complaining to nobody in particular. “Fuck I hate today! Everyone is being a fucking idiot!” She looks at me and reaches over the counter with a leathery freckle-covered arm. Grabbing my wrist with a kind of grotesquely acute strength she continues “Oh, everyone but you, you’ve been sweet.” She smiles as row after row of blackened teeth testify to a long hard life filled with $20 blowjobs and freebase methamphetamine. I try and snatch my arm away from her but her grip is too tight. I don’t want to be impolite but I can’t break her grip and I am starting to tumble between those scarred and glistening lips into that horrible rotting mouth. At that moment, feeling very lightheaded, my mind wanders out of my body. I pick it up a few minutes later behind the dumpsters out back. Cowering there in the shadow of a dusty semi truck I carefully peel the backing off one of the stickers. I look over my shoulder at the message scrawled with a fingertip in the dusty side of the trailer “Jesus loves you!” right next to the message “Show me your hooters, I dare you!” I throw the backing to one of the stickers into the rusty steel dumpster that’s already half filled with bloody clotheshanger abortions and broken Coors longnecks. I slap the sticker on the once green box, scribble ‘abandon all hope ye who ender here’ across the front of it, then jump back into my Uhaul.

The interstate gives sanctuary for the next whole tank of gas. I pull over again in Collinsville to snap a few shots of a giant ketchup bottle. Just outside of St. Louis I spend about 45 minutes trying to get into a massive rusting factory with no success. I drive in circles past burned out neighborhoods and small groups of black people just sitting on front lawns watching life ooze slowly out of their bodies. There is trash everywhere, the place looks like law and government have been discarded remorselessly years ago. I swerve through St. Louis on the ‘actual’ Route 66. Traffic is frustrating, its hot, everyone has a disappointed look on their face. When you spend more time and effort finding and photographing a giant 80 foot high ketchup bottle than the St. Louis arch you realize that you’ve turned a corner in your life. The heat starts to overwhelm me so I stop at ‘Dirt Cheap’ to grab a couple cool daddy’s. The woman ahead of me in line seems excited. Half white, half mexican, half black. Her purchase consists of a 6-pack, lotto tickets, and cigarettes. The frayed old football jersey she wears shimmies left and right over soiled gray sweat pants as she animates to the more important details of the story she’s telling to the visibly disgusted checkout clerk. “…he was workin’ me up so good…” It was all I needed to hear, the rest was pulp fiction predictable. I pay for my beer and walk back outside, cracking the first one immediately. As I take that first delicious swig I hear traffic droning around me, bees buzzing in my ears, and a dead hot wind rubs past my face. A cop looks at me from across the parking lot and I stare him in the eyes fearlessly. He knows I am in violation, his computer readout is blinking red bold letters inside his head, but he does nothing.

HEY

LETS

GO!

By the time I chuck the first empty into the growing collection of garbage in the cab of my Uhaul I hit Merrimac Caverns and decide to take a detour. The memory of my recent subway mission in Los Angeles rattles around in my head as I probe through the depths of Jessie James’ old hideout. Ducking low ceilings and cheesy pedantic tourguide humor my tour group makes its way through the darkness. The group consists of 8 other people, all of them old, like retirement old, probably all taking that trip across America that they’ve been telling their kids about for the past 30 years. They have fancy new cameras but no knowledge on how to operate them. They wear old style clothes on their old bodies and make old style jokes out of their old mouths. They huddle together and repeat the same statement 4 times into deaf old ears, wasting away the last precious moments of their lives on some trip across the country that will probably end in the grave. I can’t imagine what America must look like to them. A world that they neither created nor have any stake left in, a country that has forgotten them and in which their contributions are lost, desperately trying to pretend that everything is alright here in this leftover wet dream from the cold war. The tour concludes with the spectacle of playing a recording of “God Bless America” while the tourguide flips switches controlling red white and blue lights that are projected onto a massive stalagtite. Many of the old people stand up and sing with their old voices along with the recording, some even salute as they sing. This is bomb shelter patriotism. This is what we would all be doing every day if the nukes fell. Here, 300 feet beneath the earth, these people can embrace their fantasy one last time, their failing eyes welling with tears and their failing hearts with pride. Their hands trembling with love of a place that no longer exists… a place that has been blown to smithereens. The song reaches its conclusion as a giant American flag is projected onto the rock structure. Everyone claps triumphantly with old hands and we shuffle back out into the daylight. My mind feels ravaged, its time for the other cool daddy.

[This is the video of the gruesome patriotic spectacle under the earth.]

I get back on the interstate trying to process everything that has just happened. That cave is where Jesse James swam through the pitch darkness in a freezing underground river to escape the law. He left his horses, his equipment, and all his loot. The lesson is that freedom is worth any price. Never surrender. And so on this trip I vow that I never shall.

The black silhouettes of fast food signs, hotels, and gas stations rise and fall against the setting sun. My feet feel vulgar, I haven’t changed my socks in days and now my toes are wrapped in a swamp of melted cheese. Squeezing my toes hard against the suffocating filth I start to zone out. My mind wandering off into an unfamiliar place. My consciousness and the road align, my thoughts whirling in synchronous revolution like the spokes on a spinning wheel that seem to slow down and reverse rotation. Somewhere far off I hear the sound of children screaming. Somewhere in this haze, somewhere in the last beams of the setting sun something changes in me. I hit the point where I just don’t care any more. Fuck hotels, fuck sleep, fuck showers and brushed teeth. Fuck exercise, fuck a healthy diet, fuck everything… just drive… just drive on. I’m down to a quarter tank and a rage starts to rise up in me. I pull off and fuel up as I wipe up spilt beer with a used dirty t-shirt. I purchase 3 large energy drinks and then hit the Taco Bell for some nutrition. The truck is too tall to clear a drive through so I challenge the locals on foot for my spot in line. The two teens ahead of me are lost in their own programming.

teen 1 – “Oh snap!!!”
teen 2 – “What’s up?”
teen 1 – “Dude, I got an extra soft taco in my bag!”
teen 2 – “Extreme! You’re so lucky dude!”

I shotgun the first energy drink and slurp down some low-grade carne. The rage starts to rise up in me again, and I start to get mad at the road. The road is the enemy. The road needs to be punished and I’m gonna punish it by driving it as hard as I can. My cycle has been established and now I rage against the rut. Beer at day, redbull at night. The cab of the Uhaul is a disaster. I’ve been just dumping all my trash in it like a time capsule filled with empty beer cans and fast food wrappers. It looks like AC/DC threw a concert in it. Strange smells arise randomly and I have no idea if its form inside the vehicle or out. The caffeine starts to run its course. I pop my retainer in and out for hours until my gums bleed. My tongue is swollen and dead, burned and blistered white from trying to eat hot pizza while doing 90 down the turnpike. Food scraps in the cab are in varying levels of decomposition. My fingers like prehensile snakes that swim through a foot of garbage before finding the taco bell bag and snatch a cold taco. I stare trancelike at the road. The colors of the road invert when I close my eyes. White on black, black on white. If you live in darkness for 6 months you go color blind… 1 year and you go completely blind. Living without consciousness or free will works the same way. My caffeine amplified foot drives the gas pedal into the floor wrathfully. Like childish dreams of omnipotence where by touching a globe you think that you can actually crush cities with your fingertip. My hateful mind recedes inward until driving becomes completely subconscious. I find myself totally looking off to the right or left, programming a playlist into my iPod, writing in my notebook and suddenly become aware that I haven’t looked at the road in 20 minutes. My heart freezes momentarily, I look up, make sure I’m not crashing, then go back to what I was doing. I even have developed my own method to sleep and drive. I turn the interior lights completely off, lean back, head against the headrest, iPod in my ears playing something mellow, squint my eyes until they are almost closed and just zone out. Its exhilarating and relaxing all at once. The cab melts away, the outside world melts away, only what is directly in front of me there in the 15 foot reach of the headlights exists. It feels like flying.

I drove through all three energy drinks, I don’t even know where I am, the sun is starting to light up the sky behind me. I pull into a dogshit motel in a dogshit part of town. Walk up to the night office, “Just put new carpet in that room” says the mask of wrinkles and melanoma. I barely have the strength to wonder what happened in the room that required new carpeting before I latch the door and go comatose.

The beeping sound of a school bus reversing woke me up. It was picking up kids from the motel I called home that night. I pull my shit together and make my way towards the continental breakfast. Waiting for my english muffins to toast while listening to the trucks drive by outside. The room is quiet, I meditate to the sounds of the toaster quietly clicking as it heats up, the coffeemaker making little gurgles, the t.v. buzzing silently on mute as images of bloody soldiers being dragged away from a blown up trucks in Iraq flicker through the room. The morning manager comes in and takes my key. “Were there any problems with the room”, this is motel talk for ‘did you break anything’. “No” I cough up with a mouthful of mucus, “everything was fine.”

I pull out of the motel into the town of El Reno. I circle around for a little while just getting my bearings. I wasn’t feeling all together in any way. I don’t know how much sleep I got but it wasn’t much. The caffeine had made the few moments of unconsciousness I did glean edgy and uncertain. I had made some excellent progress in the night but at what cost. I was about to grab a bite at the local diner until it happened. I saw it. I saw him. He didn’t even have a face but I saw him staring at me and I knew I had to save him. I pull over, subtly parking my Uhaul truck next to the house. I left the motor running. Get out. Pretend to be sending a text message on my cell phone as if these inbreds even know what a text message is, or a cell phone, or a toothbrush. I check my corners, looks clear, I go for it. Running up to the pumpkin I quickly throw my cell phone in my pocket and unzip my jacket. Shit, zippers stuck, ok got it. I pick him up, just when I hear somebody yell “HEY!!” I come to grips with the fact that stuffing a 30lb pumpkin in your jacket is harder than it looks. Two crusty looking rednecks come running from across the street. “SHIT!!” I scream in my head as I run full speed in flip flops back to my truck. I open the door and the pumpkin and I jump in. Clutter and trash are everywhere, I try to close the door but I’m hung up on the seatbelt and can’t quite get all the way in. The rednecks are getting closer. Finally, just before the door closes in the nick of time my atlas and maps and printouts of roadside stuff to check out falls out of the car. “SHIT!!” I cry out, this time not caging the words in my brain. There’s no way to go back and recover that stuff. I see it blowing away in the wind as the two rednecks point and yell at me angrily as I speed away.

“Well that could have gone better.” I say and turn to look at the pumpkin riding shotgun. A friend was now made. I pulled behind some abandoned buildings and gave him a name and a face. I had stolen him from a front lawn. His life was different now, changed, metamorphosed. Because of this I named him “Gregor”. Gregor’s mantra was then written on the back of his head;

MY NAME IS
GREGOR
I HAVE A FLAWED
CREATOR
I KNOW I AM GOING
TO DIE

Gregor was now my travel companion, but the price of his freedom was high. All my maps and directions were lost. We are directionless. Fuck it, Jesse James right, no price is too high!

Me “Gregor, sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
Gregor “…”
Me “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

Gregor and I stop to celebrate. I get us each an energy drink to celebrate our small victory. As we sat there drinking our caffeine in the rest stop parking lot two boney hookers slither up to us. They ask me what’s the deal with my pumpkin and I tell them that he is my travel companion on a cross country road trip. They instantly love him. All the girls like Gregor but they aren’t showing any interest in me. I’m better looking but he’s got a great personality. I wanted to get the two prosties, you know, one for each of us, but Gregor hogged them both. You would think that he would show me a little gratitude for his rescue but no. I feel hurt but I think I understand.

Oklahoma is beautiful country but it smells like buffalo piss. Gregor’s stomach was gurgling so loud that it was starting to piss me off so I conceded to pulling over and getting something to eat. I guess he really worked up an appetite with those Oklahoma skanks. I carry Gregor inside and the waitress leads us to our booth. I tell her that he’s going to need a booster seat. She looks confused, but my face never betrays the request for an instant. I ordered the pigs in a blanket while Gregor just stuck to a bowl of oatmeal.

scared waitress “Would you like something for dessert?”
me “Yes, do you have pumpkin pie?”
scared waitress “Yes we do.”
me “Oh great, I’ll have a slice.”

She disappears momentary and then brings me the pie.

Me “Man, now THAT is tasty pie!”
Gregor “…”
Me “What? No.”
Gregor “…”
Me “Cannibal!”

We pay our bill and get back on the route.

We derail off the interstate all the way through Oklahoma so that we can drive the original Route 66 through all the ghetto little towns. I pull off in Clinton to check things out. A tall lean radio tower stretches into the pale blue sky. An American flag flaps in the wind. Endless barren miles of light brown grass reach off into the horizon in every direction punctuated only by a few patches of trees and spots where the red soil is visible. The trees are amazing, bright yellow leaves covering black bark, branches sticking out in every direction like a primitive dance. A dog riding in the back of a flatbed truck filled with rusting dirty shovels stares me in the eyes as I sit at a stoplight. The sun is warm through the windshield, the rhythm of the wind beating the outside of my Uhaul is soothing. The comforting redundant strobing of the white dotted line and the calm vibration of the wheels on the road. The mellow yellows of the grass and the pale blue of the sky, I zone out for what feels like weeks. When I wake up I am mindlessly staring at the flashing orange light above a yellow and black “WIDE LOAD” sign on a dirty black truck that is hauling large grease covered pieces of farm equipment. Jumping and sparking like a chain being dragged behind a large truck my conscious mind flashes back to life.

A quick look left and I come face to face with a place advertising ‘fried onion burgers’, of course I get totally sucked in. Dairy Fresh is seemingly an endless collection of small town images. Bald tires, Styrofoam cups, calloused hands, red dirt under every fingernail. It sits across the street from where sleeping freight trains are rusting on the tracks. The people in the Dairy Fresh look like the cast from a failed horror movie. Two completely obese women work behind the counter. The less fat one takes my order while the grotesquely fat one waddles around behind the scenes cooking up the burgers and shit. They both have American flag t-shirts on. The grotesquely fat woman is wearing a neck brace that is pushing all the thick pink ruffles of her neck fat up around her face. She looks like an uncircumcised cock. There is a lit cigarette stuck in the middle of her face. Her movements are stiff, lumbering, like a drunken penguin. Stubby varicose legs drop straight down from under her jean-shorts. She senses that I’m staring at her and she turns her whole upper body around like a tank turret, aiming that cig directly at me like a cannon about to fire. I can feel my stomach turn as her brain tries to figure me out before giving up and guiding her bloated bulk back into the kitchen.

The customers are no better than the employees. A bald dirty biker in leather sticks his tongue all the way out of his body before biting into his burger. When he swallows the motion causes a ripple in the several shallow chins that cascade down his neck. A surly native American woman with dark close set eyes and loose pock marked jowls that hang down limply on the sides of her face talks angrily with the little girl sitting across from her. There are numerous small bluing tattoos all over the sagging gray flesh on her arms that come to life when she shakes her finger at the little girl every two minutes. In the far corner sits a man with an extreme widows peak in his reddish brown hair and very bad purple acne scars all over his face. His dark sunken eyes flash around the room quickly as his body moves with insect like precision. The rest of the customers are a collection of dusty ballcaps and striped long sleeve cowboy shirts. Brown leather belts and one man with a long pink scar down the entire side of his face. My food comes and I feel at home as I take my retainer out.

A twisted green pickle slice falls out of my burger as I eat. I pick it up between the tips of my thumb and pointer finger. I hold it up momentarily – staring at it as the restaurant scene plays unfocussed in the background. Then I carefully drag it through a small light brown and white puddle of grease and burger juice on the paper lining the inside of my red plastic mesh bowl. I lift it up again and place it on my tongue. It is gone.

I look over at widows peak as the waitress brings him his food. He begins a meticulous process of completely deconstructing his burger and examining every layer. It seems so deliberate that it makes me wonder if I should have done the same. Only now do I realize that he is missing the tips of two fingers at the first knuckle. The waitress asks him if he’s found work yet. He says something inaudible through the food in his mouth. Yellow teeth in the middle of a scarred purple face gnashing through grease and meat. For my dollar the fried onion burger was pretty damn good. Seems like everyone else in town thinks the same thing.

This is the truly good thing about Route 66. If you follow it true then you have to get off the interstate. Because of the interstate the route has become obsolete, too slow, too out of the way, outdated. In this way it is more relevant because of the interstate than the interstate is itself. This is the heart of this journey, get off the main road. If you just go from point A to point B then nothing is ever going to happen and that is not living. If nothing happens, you are not affected, and you have no potential to change, then you are not alive.

I burn out of town and don’t take a breath until I’ve broken through the Texas border. A semi truck going the opposite direction flashes his lights. I kill speed and get right just in time. Speed trap. Set up right there in the median just over the rise. I would have been nailed for sure. “Thanks trucker, I owe you one” I say to myself. By “one” I mean a blowjob. That’s the law of the road. Trucker saves you from getting a ticket, you owe him a blowjob. It’s a well documented fact. I speed past Shamrock. I get it, everything is green right?… Next town. Texas… absolute nothingness as far as the eye can see. The silhouettes of cowboy hats through the back windows of puckup trucks. A man hosing down the flaking boards covering the windows of his dilapidated house. What’s the deal with cowboy hats anyway?!? Texans are like Muslims in that way, prisoners to the past. I hit McLean and pull off to roll the ‘actual’ 66. Holy fucking hellhole! The place is like a ghost town, you can clearly hear the Texas flag flapping in the breeze outside the “Devil’s Rope” barbed wire museum. This is a no-shit one-horse town. Fuck, it’s a fucking one-intersection town with just a flashing yellow stoplight blinking at nobody in the middle of the road. I would have snapped a photo of the beautiful Texas landscape but I only had 138 more pictures left on my digital and I didn’t want to waste one. Just imagine a canvas painted on the top half in blue and the bottom half in brown. That’s fucking Texas for you.

I wore a barbed wire cowboy hat.

I saw the leaning tower of texas.

I threw devil horns at the biggest cross on planet earth.

Joke I overheard in Texas:

Q: Why don’t niggers take aspirin?

A: Because they gotta pick cotton to get to it.

Mexican radio stations join the dial now in a major way. I’m getting closer to California, thank god. I get hungry again and what the fuck do you do when you are hungry in Texas? Eat a gigantic fucking steak. I pull off in Amarillo at the Big Texas Steakhouse and attempt to do myself proper. A half dozen fat homely waitresses in Daisy Duke’s and cowboy hats and boots whirl around the weary looking truckdrivers. Deer and steer heads cover the wooden walls. It looks like a place of worship for a cult. I sit there waiting for my feast and the only question that is burning up my brain is simply “Can an entire city of 175,000 people smell like cow shit?” Unfortunately the answer is yes. Yes, the whole city can, yes the whole county can, yes the whole fucking state can. Texas smells like shit. As I soak up the blood with my dinner rolls I ponder the millions of empty calories I’ve consumed on this journey. Fuck it, it’s a road trip, you’re gonna eat like shit, its fucking inevitable. With the steak and beers up in me I roll out to snap off a few of the good old “Cadillac Ranch”. Yep, 10 caddies half buried in the middle of nowhere. This is a turning point on my adventure. I depart Route 66 here to take a detour to somewhere I’ve always wanted to see. Roswell New Mexico.

[Check out the pix of the caddie ranch here.]

Road trips change you in a way, change the way you look at things. 1000 miles, shit, I could make that today. A full tank of gas is something magical, mythical, full of almost unlimited potential. Who knows what will happen and where you will end up, but that’s half the fun of it. I drive straight into the setting sun and Texas is trying to stop me with every dirty trick in the book. The reek is so profound that I can’t even think. As I drive through the stench, the silhouettes of barren trees, powerlines, and massive farm equipment press their forms against the sky after sunset. It would be almost beautiful if it didn’t stink SO FUCKING BAD!

Me – “I fucking HATE Texas!”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Fuck man, you’re right. They should just let them have it.”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Well as long as it doesn’t affect me, fuck it!”
Gregor – “…”

I lean over to change the radio station and my beer spills all over my lap. The truck jumps over a rock, its out of control in the dusty wastes. I snap back into the moment, an icicle stabs through my heart, one hand on the wheel the other reaching to protect Gregor.

Me – “Hold on!! Fuck!!”

My foot stabs murderously at the brake pedal. The Uhaul comes to rest in a large dust cloud 20 feet off the side of the road.

Me – “You ok man?”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Thank god, dude. What the fuck happened?”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Well god damn.”

I hop out and inspect the damages, a few scratches, some plants stuck in the bumper, but nothing that is going to cause any problems. I piss in the dirt and get back on the road.

I follow the speed limits like an old man at this point. I don’t want to draw any more attention or get delayed here in any way. I’m in the middle of fucking nowhere Texas and they don’t give tickets to outsiders here. They just make them squeal like a pig. This is truly BF Texas. I pull over in Clovis and top the tank off, I don’t want to take any chances. They spell a lot of words with boots and horse shoes around here. You’d think people would get sick of it but its fucking everywhere. A tall dirty Texan filling up his completely shit-canned chevy station wagon comes up to me at the gas station as I dump petroleum into my ride.

Dirty Texan pointing to my shirt – “Hey duuude, what are the ‘Ramon-ies’?”
Me – “Ramones, a punk back from New York City. Basically the first punk band ever.”
Dirty Texan – “Punk huh… Well we like country western around here.”
Me – “The Ramones are like the Hank Williams of punk, or maybe the Johnny Cash.”
Dirty Texan – “I guess some people like Chevys and some people like Fords.. What do you like?”
Me – “Huh, oh.. I guess I like Chevy cars and Ford trucks, man.”
Dirty Texan – “Hah! Well you’re alright duuude.”

I press on. The road can be a lonely place at night. Darkness surrounds you for hours. Nothing to look at, nothing to do. I talk to Gregor about everything under the sun but even that gets old. I want to be home but I don’t at the same time. I’m still a little nervous about it, don’t ask me why. At least I’m in New Mexico now, progress has been slow but inevitable. 50 miles from Roswell and I’m the only car on the road. I tried holding my breath between cars going the opposite direction but it was impossible. I almost blacked out. Somehow I’m hungry again, sober now, and I just want more. Booze and food. I want to get fucked up really bad and smash this night into a thousand pieces. The Uhaul is pegged at 90. Its so dark its scary. I wait for a long straight stretch of road, line the truck up in the middle of the highway, and turn all the lights off. My heart feels like its going to explode through my chest. I hold it as long as I can or until I hear the vibro warning on one side of the road.

Me – “What the fuck am I doing, I must be suicidal..?”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “No, that’s not it. God, Imagine if we really did crash.”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Yeah, maybe you’re right, but the wreck would be ungodly.”

Roswell, I finally made it, fucking Roswell. There are rednecks everywhere. Hunger and alcoholism kick in like a motherfucker. I pull over to fuel up again and get some supplies. I dig through the trash in the cab until I find an uneaten Taco Bell soft taco. As I walk into the circle K a fat troll sitting on a stool with her arms folded and resting on her large gut speaks to me.

Troll – “Looks like your hamburger’s wilted.”
Me – “It’s a soft taco.”
Troll – “Y’onna heat it up in the microwave over’n there?”
Me – “No thanks, it’s gonna taste like shit anyway and I just don’t care.”
Troll – “A’ight thenn, have a nice night.”

I found the fucking aliens. Its rednecks. Rednecks and white trash. They’re everywhere. They’re taking over. It is definitely an invasion. Weapons are not photon torpedoes or death rays – its poor hygene and tackiness, bleeding gums and acne. The story of the crash was just a way to get tourists to come here. I wouldn’t trust anything anybody here told me even if I already thought it was true. Hell, it would make me question whether I had been right to begin with.

I got a room in town, dumped off my basic survival gear, and headed back out to the truck. It was time for me to complete an important mission. I took my bottle of tequila and 40oz of Hurricane HG (Heavy Gravity Lager) “brewed for a distinct bold taste” 8.1% alcohol/volume and headed out into the desert. I was going to take those 150 bucks worth of fireworks and signal the fucking alien mothership. I was going to set the sky on fire and if the fireworks wouldn’t do it then the tequila would. I drove outside of town and found a road that dead-ended into the desert. I pulled Gregor out of his seat and set him up on a large rock. This is where we would make our stand. Taking powerful large and sultry swigs of the tequila and then washing it down with a swallow of 40 we began to set shit off. I don’t know how many people have ever bought a giant 150 $ box of fireworks but let me tell you that it’s a fucking LOT of fireworks. We were using the 40 bottle to launch the rockets after Gregor polished it off. Now it was just the two of us, a half bottle of tequila, and the rest of the pyro and this is when it happened. Out of nowhere I fucking heard it. It was unmistakable.

Bwoop. Bwoow.

It was a fucking alien space ship. The aliens in this space ship were disguised as police officers and their ship was disguised as a police car. I knew they were aliens because they were rednecks and because they flashed their red and blue laserbeams at me. I was in a panic. I never expected this to actually work, but it did and now I was totally unprepared. We had succeeded in signaling the aliens and now they were here and wanted to fucking abduct us. Oh hell no! Jesse James, right? Freedom is worth any price. I threw the rest of the fireworks and the half bottle of tequila into the cab nearly leaving Gregor behind until I made one last trip to round him up. I started her up and then slowly pulled off the road.

Me – “Hang on buddy, this is gonna be a bumpy ride!”
Gregor – “…”

If I used my headlights or brakes then the police aliens would see me and triangulate my location using their radar guns. So here I was. Bouncing through the desert unable to see or stop. I could hear all my stuff in the back slamming home as the back of the truck created a virtual zero-g environment as I careened over ditches and mounds. I could see the police aliens shining their white beams around where I had just been but I was already too far into the desert for them to see me now. A few miles through the sagebrush and we were back on the main road. We had made it. We had escaped the aliens. We were free.

We pull back into the hotel and drag ourselves inside. We start drinking harder and harder, celebrating the victory that we had achieved. Celebrating our freedom. The last thing I remember was Gregor finishing off the bottle of tequila and eyeing me crazily. I black out.

The next morning I woke up feeling like absolute shit. I was still drunk, my face hurts, feels like spiders are crawling over it. Stomach is overwhelmed with pungent sour queasiness. The room is fucking devastated. All my shit was everywhere. The beds were overturned, the tv was facedown on the floor, and it smelled like death. Gregor was sitting in the corner just eyeballing me. He had gotten way to drunk last night and gone completely berserk. The room was destroyed, he had kicked my ass, my knuckles were swollen and bleeding, there was god knows what all over the walls, and on top of all of that he had gotten into one of my jars of pickles from Toledo then puked it all up on my Ramones t-shirt.

Me – “YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “IS THAT ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF!?!”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Well, alright, FUCK! we gotta get the fuck out of here right fucking now, but this is not over.”

That day we ditched the Uhaul behind an old brick building and spent the morning just acting like tourists. We knew the aliens had us on their hit list and we needed to conceal our true natures behind a mask of slack-jawed photo snapping. After what felt like an eternity it was time to leave, time to move on. We had found the aliens, and the aliens are us. As we drive through the desert wastelands the cab stinks of tequila so bad that I have to keep rolling down the windows to flush the airlock with clean air. My eyes watering, taste of shit on my tongue, and I’m still drunk. Gregor forgot to charge my iPod even though I reminded him a million times and it was completely dead in like 2 minutes. The radio does three laps before settling on the same staticy Mexican station. My consciousness had been abducted last night, and now we were like undead creatures wandering through the desert in search of our souls.

We drove hard west until we reached the disheveled town of Alamogordo. It has long been my intention to investigate one of the best urban legends ever circulated regarding the lost treasure trove of buried Atari cartridges in the desert outside Alamogordo.

Read the whole story here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_%28Atari_2600%29#The_Atari_landfill

I often question why I seek out these lost relics. Why I explore these burned out buildings and abandoned subway tunnels. The fact is that you find things there. No not money or treasure, but truth. Rust is real. People don’t create rust, it happens from neglect. Rust is the death of caring. The death of progress. Slime is real, decay is real, trash is real, garbage doesn’t lie, it just is. These things do not exist in plain sight on purpose. Deformities are hidden, abnormalities destroyed. You have to look to find them. Look between the lines, off the main road, in the cracks. The interstitial spaces. That’s what getting off the interstate is all about. That is the horror and grotesque spectacle that is the truth. We are the fucking aliens. We are horrible, nasty, disgusting little creatures and that is our legacy. So that which is disgusting I find beautiful. That which is abandoned I will seek out. That which is shunned I will welcome. That which is turned away from I will turn towards. So in those places where nobody wants to go and most have forgotten, that’s where you’ll find me. Sifting through the dirt just outside Alamogordo where a dozen conflicting rumors have led me. Here on my knees fondling the sand in search of something that may have never existed in the first place. This is postmodern archaeology. This is the maddening quest that may produce what? A small black square of plastic. God, the carts and circuit boards are probably biodegraded away by now anyway. I had searched all day and even visited the grave of the first space monkey at the Aerospace Museum but it was all for nothing. Again, my search had left me dirty, tired, and totally lacking tangible success.

I get back on the interstate. A minivan passes me at white sands. Three screaming kids, mom riding shotgun, dad driving. They fly past me at 100 mph. As they scream by I notice the California license plates. Joy fills my heart, they are going where I am going. I feel a connection. Maybe I can follow them all the way to San Diego? But as soon as our paths meet they diverge. I decide to pull off and explore the dunes before pressing hard west.

Gregor and I enjoy a good half hour of running up and down the white dunes. It really is pretty cool but time is moving us forward and we needed to be moving with it. I get back on the interstate and hit the road harder than ever. We drive for hours. No music is playing, nothing can be heard except the sounds of the road. We have both been changed by this journey, but Gregor has started down a road that I can not follow. I am the hands of change in his life, the motive of revolution. This is it, this is the place. The continental divide. As I pull off the interstate he asks me where we are going but he already knew. The spot. The sun is a blinding yellow ball. Its rays shooting deep into my squinting eyes even through my sunglasses. The pale blue sky masked behind the criss crossing vapor trails of jets. A sparse and thin wispy layer of clouds glows in the near sunset. A soft quiet wind is rustling in the tall brown grass that crunches under my bare feet. The expression on your face. Knowing, intelligent, fearful, yet ready. I walk towards you quickly. You sit there unmoving, unflinching, looking me directly in the eyes. I raise the shotgun. It is cool and weightless in my hands. The action is smooth, perfect. I aim at your face effortlessly, instinctually. Things are moving in slow motion but the violence is completely shocking. I see your eyes at that last moment. Those eyes staring right into mine, right through me.

BLAM!!

chk chk

BLAM!!

chk chk

BLAM!!

Your head explodes into a million soggy pieces. Tiny orange and white bits of your brain stick to my face. I stand there for a moment frozen. Trancelike. The wind rustles quietly through the grass. Caressing the fresh moisture on my face. I stare at what is left of your head. Unrecognizable. Blown completely apart. Hollow, empty, and utterly lifeless. Gregor, my friend, is dead.

At the moment of the kill there was a direct line. Me to Gregor to the sun. That means something. Out here in the badlands, out here in the wastelands. A million miles from the interstate, a million miles from everything. Here at the continental divide.

Nothing will remain here to mark the spot of your death. The only tombstone, the only epitaph is burned into my mind. Those eyes. Staring right through me at the moment I snatched your life. Those hollow knowing eyes, haunting me forever. I got back on the interstate and drove straight into the sun. As the sun set the sky was writhing, and convulsing with oranges, greens, pinks, and reds. The clouds caught fire and seared my eyes with their brilliance. The sun was also setting on Gregor’s blown apart corpse, still laying mangled in that barbed wire. I killed him there on the devil’s rope. And so I drove on into the night.

[gregor's snuff film]

The hundreds of dead bugs on the windshield glow red, green, and white as the lights hit them. They glow in intricate geometric formations, express mathematical formulas like the movement of distant stars and galaxies. Converse, commune, interact, intertwine into the constellations of ancient gods and heroes. I pray to them with my eyes as I drive. I meditate on them. Their changing colors and patterns reflect the exact situation of the road at night. They throb to life with the flashing lights ahead. I hit the first traffic in five days. Two long rows of dual red lights extend before me. I stay hard left all the way to the wreck – it’s the minivan. The one that passed me back in White Sands. Its overturned at the center of a ring of burning flares. Cops are shining flashlights around and there are three white sheets covering small piles on the ground (one of which is soaked through with blood). The smell of burning engine fluids and plastic assaults my nostrils. I muddle through, traffic releases like an orgasm. I drive on. I ponder the situation momentarily. Fuck ‘em. At least I’m not dead. I look over at the empty passenger seat and a smirk creeps over my face like scum over stagnant water.

It was finally time for the last hard drive. I keep the peddle bottomed out for hours as the Uhaul screams through the night. I think about all the people I’d met and all the things I’d seen along the way. I imagine Gregor, now finally transformed into spirit form, watching over my journey. At the California border I get pulled off to the side. The two pigs try to good cop/bad cop me as their dog sniffs and re-sniffs my truck. The condescending little dog handler seems irate that I am so calm and just laughing at him as he says in hateful triumph that the dog indicated the presence of drugs or illegal aliens in my Uhaul. He nearly reaches for his gun when I tell him jovially that it’s not my fault his dog is fucking wrong. I open the back for them as they stand obliquely hands on their holsters. When the open bay door reveals only kit bags and cruise boxes I send the dog-cop off with one parting shot before getting back on the interstate. I fucking hate pigs. There were two more checks along the way and I guess the border pigs radio’d ahead because I got the living shit sniffed out of my Uhaul at both of them. They too came up negative. They don’t have a dog yet that can sniff out free will, so fuck off you robots.

I get back into San Diego and it almost feels like I’ve got more questions than answers. The next day I empty out the Uhaul, clean up my apartment, hang the art and put the newfound trinkets around the place. Brad comes down from L.A. and we get wasted, jam guitars, talk about life, and finally cap off the road trip with one final act.

We fire the blue rocket.

Unlike shopping mall promises and infomercial lies, the blue rocket delivers. Nearly as big as a can of quaker oats and bearing warnings to “light and get away” because it ” shoots flaming balls”. Even Gregor let out a zenlike moan from the spirit realm as the blue stars exploded into the night. The next day I finally threw my jeans into the wash. I felt like the washing machine was somehow stealing the soul of the things. Soap and warm water flowing through the fabric replacing the collected memories from a great journey with mindless April freshness. And so with my jeans washed free of two weeks worth of travel grime I got back in line at the supermarket and switched my brain into autopilot with the rest of the nation. New goals; another dollar, another woman, another set at the gym, five pounds heavier, five pounds lighter, move from point A to point B more quickly, more painlessly, dissociate farther from reality, run for office, get angry at traffic, save the whales, eat less carbs, get whiter teeth, get a longer erection, smoke less cigarettes, drink more blueberry juice, floss more, start drinking decaf, read more, flip somebody off and really mean it, register to vote, help the homeless, watch more tv.