It had been a long week on I-95. A bizarre empty week, spent wasted under overpasses and in hedges. Drunk and exhausted and sick. Wasn't expected to be such a week, just played out that way. It was supposed to be just like it used to be. Back in the fevered reaches of innocence and free-spiriting out on the river of highways. When young, it was all an adventure. An experience, separate from everything else. Even a retreat of sorts. Running up the Interstate like a crab, thumb wagging, hair awry in the wind bellying off the road.
Meet new people while hitchiking! Ruminate by the side of the highway! Have new thoughts full of depth and indelibility! Forget same thoughts of incredible indelibility!
After a week on the road this time, I was drained and kinda mulchy. Numb staring at the same toes staring out of the same boots I stared at tromping pavement on Ponce. Meant to be otherwise, it was in fact as absolutely the same as could be imagined. Following a groove in a cold metal chamber wherever I was. My life on the street had become a gun. I was stuck in the chamber. A blank?
Just a small trip, down the block and up from Hotlanta, a mere 600 miles on I-95, which in those days, even with the growing Meese-esque, Reaganesque John Birch Society-lite-esque paranoia, there were still plenty of folks more than willing to stop, to help out, to enjoy the company and the story, just like me then, the story two-way, and it was taking me a week this time! A sick and lonely week without romance or energy. I felt like a sledder caught in melting snow out in the middle of the outside, caught. But I had an objective, a drunken one, a fixation which held me headed back to No'fuk. That toilet still drew me. Remembrance of things best forgotten. Muddy memory and it was Mother's Day I was aiming for.
And god knows I was tired and burnt from the booze, the cheap convenience-store beer I was drinking. Trying to return to a stride remembered from when it all worked, and 600 miles was nothing but a night's work and a little more, non-stop. Nothing but headlights and fellow late-night boozers and truckers and getting high off the sky's dark noise or the distant urban lights. Driving without headlights, guided by a full moon. Every word was poetry.
Great memories to live for, to go bent for! Too bad the booze didn't work anymore. It had turned to the poison, like a snake waiting for me in the dark corner, it had found me finally; and a night's work “adventuring” had become a week-long slog ending in a weedpatch behind a shopping mall on Mother's Day. With a handful of beers, cheap Kmart fare, Pearl beer for a dollar sixty-nine a sixer. Four left to wake on.
Grendel had descended on the village and all the villagers but me had had the wisdom to leave. I was alone in the village/weedpatch with my cheap American beer wondering where everybody'd gone. What'supwiththat? Then, I felt Grendel's hot breath…oh, now I get it. Time to quit this scene and it was too late. Now, I get it. Life doesn't run according to my program anymore. Nothing but fumes in the air.
