He is driving, driving, driving the silver coated Chevette
that used to belong to his Grandfather in Chicago land, the little-put-put that
Uncle Bob sold to Grandpa at four times it’s net worth, and he is driving.
Driving. Sunglasses peeled into his imminent vision, his hair slightly ruffled into a tsunami wave, fashionably blown back by the gusts of wind cracking
through the windows. He is driving, driving. The cement on the road morphing
into a river of quickly blurred vertical staples, past. Driving. The speedometer arching
near sixty as he crosses the thick orange rustic skeletal rungs of the bridge,
not bothering to look North, to look to the direction of Appleton, to look to
the place where he has left already. He is driving forward and he is trying not
to look back, trying not to think about anything at all, trying just to drive.
It is
autumn and everything is golden, the sun strikes heavy rays of coned light. The
blue book he received from Craig, his creative writing professor, is crumpled
up, the size of a baby cabbage, and abandoned in the back seat. He is driving
fast in November of 1997, slight tendrils of smoke steam through his lips. He
is not thinking about last year, how he left half of his heart in Appleton. He
is not thinking about the moat-serpentine brick layered community college that
broaches him with a feeling of pending failure. He does not think about his
parents seeming not to want anything to do with him, he does not think about
how he is the oldest progeny and works his ass off all the time, always
working, while both of his younger siblings frisk the spines and lined
appendages of their instruments at esteemed University’s. He does not dwell on
or muse over any of this, as he drives, a Camel cork butt fluttering out the
side window disappearing from his periphery in the side window.
There is the spaghetti curve off of I-74
that spills on to University and the chimney top of Geisert pushes up into
view. There are obnoxious, Bradley students with too much of their parents cash
usurped on their meal plans roving in between building and the sun, directly
overhead, shooting down as if sending him a cryptic messaged harvested in a
sliver of light. He turns right on the corner of Main and University, drives
above the speed limit, watching as the speedometer arches above fifty in a 30
mph. He can taste the salt settling in between his eyes, the cold feeling of
hollow loneliness as he adjusts his weight and the car bends form Main, on to
Western, the neighbor of lonely houses and gashed windows that his been his
home. His weight shifts once again and he is on Sherman, pulling over near the
sidewalk after exactly one block. As the side door to the silver bullet rivets
open and then hammers into a mechanical laced thud, he is not thinking about
all the places he has ever been. He is not thinking about his European
sojourns, three times in four years during his tortuous high school epidemic.
He is not thinking about his strawberry-brass colored hair that was an original
gift to Ribbon girl. He is not thinking now about how his penis was lodged
between the face of some girl he just met two weeks ago, nor is he thinking
about his literary legends. David Foster Wallace’s INFINITE JEST weighing heavy
on his writers' desk, along with stashed notebook of palsied poems, personal
discourses, failed novels. Several issues of Playboy featuring Jen McCartney
and Tiffany Taylor remained lodged under several half-completed notebooks.
Neatly cut photographs recently departed Allen Ginsberg, of Bob Dylan flanked
by a quote from Carl Sandburg, commenting that he certainly seems like an
intense young man. There is Ani DiFranco’s chords and poetry and the caseete
tape of Depeche Mode’s ULTRA. There is a copy of Ulysses and a LUMs coffee mug
with a bouquet of pens sprouting from within. The room is golden; slashes of
light hit the side of the window and splash off of the bed, ricocheting on to
the floor. There are books everywhere, a locomotive stream of Angels taped
above his bed. The original postcard of Ralphael’s Angels sent to him from
Mark-Andrew (then Mark) on his sixteenth birthday. He is not thinking about New
York last spring or Dallas last summer. He is not thinking about Afterwards in
Chicago, nor about Damian Segovia. He is not thinking about his creative
writing Prof.’s fascination with Woody Allan nor is he thinking about Margot
Willard form Roanoke who he sporadically espies from time to time speeding
through the corridors of campus. The light paints a lengthy strip of sunlight
in the center of his room, granting his room the appearance of a golden acorn.
He is not thinking about Alexis about Ramona Love never returning his phone
messages on time, nor is he thinking about the letter that Brook sent him that
night when he was highlighting passages from Lolita. He is not thinking about
how large his library has grown, nor is he thinking about the novel he is
trying to write that is all about basketball and opera, trying not to think
about how much time he spends scanning black and white squared barcodes on the
back of items that remind him of calligraphic windows in a prison cell. He is trying not to
think about what his life would be like if he could be normal, if he would be
at a four year university, if his parents would have done what they did with
both Bethany and Jenn earlier this autumn, if they would have loaded up his
possessions in the back of the mini-van and driven down the long corridors of
the highway, he would be away form here, away form the place that nourished
him, he would be away, unable to hand much more than four beers in an outing.
He would be away and he would be all alone- as he is now.
He thinks too much.
It is more
than likely YUKON blend, purchased from a Starbucks in downtown Chicago. The beans he keeps in the freezer, pouring
them into the mechanical grinder his grandmother first gave him four years and
an eternity ago, when he started casually sipping coffee. He is not thinking
about Delillo’s Underwolrd, or about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logical
Philosophicus. He is not thinking about William James or Carol Maso’s Ava. He
is not thinking about any of these books-books he has discovered and read
because David Foster Wallace mentioned them in a Review of Contemporary Fiction
interview Karl form work brought to him at a discounted price. The cover of
Cynthia Ozick’s Levitation is green and artsy and makes him what to move to New
York and write book reviews for the Times. Jonathan Franzen’s 27th
city is intriguing and Rick Moody’s Purple America lies next to Antrim’s 100
brothers. All of these are the boys new found literary heroes, and, although he
is mad and pissed off at his parents, he realizes that he never would have
heard these names had he not been so engrossed with work.
He brews
the coffee so, as Megan’s bookmark said over a year ago, it is black as night
and hot as hell. He considers fumbling over to the record player, which he
does, listening to Judy Collin’s echo out Last thing on my Mind. Pricking up
the needle, placing Dylan’s Times they are-a changin’, waiting for the
filters to dibble the solution into the pot. He has burnt out numerous coffee
machines since he first starting sipping coffee five years ago and keeps the
pots piled up in the corner of his room, next to a makeshift bookshelf his
father found for him in an alley behind the gas station, a shelf that used to
house cartons of generic cigarettes.
He is
leaving, switching albums once again, her hears Joni Mitchell dripping a sexy
blue monotone to her voice as she sings through the speakers about being happy
to see the ever elusive second person pronoun again. The coffee still
percolating, dripping caffeinated ambrosia. He rushes up the brown
staircase-many of the books he has traveled with are now on permanent loan to
females he will never again speak with. On the Road is somewhere near Chicago,
with Ramona. Leaves of Grass, given as a gift to Brook Bauer. Instead, he
grapples the copy of Infinite Jest, and places it in the center of his desk,
making a note to himself that everything that is tucked between those
mattress-pages is everything he ever wants to say.
Downstairs
and the healthy crackle reverberates from the record player, skipping over the
last Stanza of See you again. He keeps the picture of Megan, the girl
from the Northern pines in his side pocket, her smile stretched apart between
her pillared cheeks like a stream. The words of the first Lutheran smeared
across her blue shirt in thick block avenue shaped letters. A wild lavender
lilac in her hair.
He flicks
the nose of the coffee machine down so that it is no longer illuminated. He
lifts the coffee up to the dashing outside light and, upon see that it is so
black that he cannot see through the glass pot, he gushes the fluid into a
thermos that he has lost the cap for, it is eleven-thirty in the morning and he
does not have to work tonight, a raked up rarity. He is leaving. The wooden
door locking itself as he egresses into autumnal light.
IL-29 is Galena road and his knuckles tease the wheel, harnessing invisible reins slicing through Chillicothe, still smoking, his speed obedient, subsiding the numerical mandates that salute him from the side of the road. Outside Chillicothe, the skeletal gray ashtray is already fraught with four cork butts, little S’s of steam quavering above. The radio in the Chevette is solely AM and remains twisted off. Thinking, driving, stroking the foot of his Doc Martens even deeper on to the gas petal, the road cutting open through fields weeded with corn husks. The autumn sun reflecting a sheen path of light off the front of his vehicle, coffee ingested between his lips, swigged, he knows the general direction where he is to go
It is an
estimated twenty miles and forty minutes of single lane road traffic, through
Chillicothe, and he is still driving. Lighting Cigarettes from the corks of the
nearly extinguished cigarettes. “Monkey-fucking” As Patrick once seemed it over
cold coffee and full ash trays at Lums. Still driving, pushing head of the long
cement slab, as if trying to find the tip of the tongue and performing a swan
dive off of it.
The road
sprawls, he passes the totemic Indian in Hopewell, knowing that he has to
leave. He crosses the old bridge at Lacon, looking north across the thick
rustic viaducts of the bridge forming V’s in his vision. He looks north viewing
the area where the cool-deep blue fabric of the river coalesce. He crosses the bridge.
At Lacon
there is the abandoned tank that sits dormant and heavy in front of the bingo
Hall. A classic WWII specialty that still has CLASS of ‘83 spray-painted in thick
letters from a cross river high school prank. His carriage pauses as the signs
to the right hand sign of the road out slanting its palm, beckoning him to
slow. He removes a rolled cylinder and, with the lighter he last used in front
of her, fires it up. Megan’s picture is still lodged in the visor above his
head. Her face seems to open up the way the earth open up come dawn. He is
driving.
He
is leaving. He is going. He has already left.
He harbors
fleeting, vaporous images of the person he was going to meet, the place where
he had already left, the place where he has already come back from. The engine
emits a healthy metallic rattle, cruising at a respectable speed, combing up
the near desolate slab of highway, passing abandon silo’s, barbed wire fences
that remind him of sheet music void of notes. He is driving, flaming up another
cigarette, driving with the driver’s window gaped open into a tinted yawn,
driving as fast as he can, smoking continuously, the ashtray fraught with ashes
and corks. Driving, he passes Varna, passes other bucolic hamlets, the fence
separating his vehicle from livestock, Autumn, still hanging, extended in the
air, life, still forecast above him. He has been driving so long that he
harbors little ideologies about how he got to the place where he is going, or
where he returned from the place where he has yet to come from.
He thinks
about the moment he originally left, last year, over a year ago. He thinks
about cramming all night for his mid-term in oral communications, he thinks
about the rustic colors of the bridge as he fueled home past school, thinks
about the smeared barges heavily knuckled out above him in the shapes of
clouds, thinks about the gray and white striped shirt that he chose that day (having
pre-ordained his attire two weeks in advance), verifying that all of his
raiments are properly laundered and folded, his face is neatly shaved, void of
all pawed razored welts. He is leaving, and this is the time he left. Left to
find that place above him and to locate her own visage in the clouds. Left to
find that place he has never seen before. Left to find that person whose body
eludes him ever still.
On a physical map, Illinois is outlined and shaped like a topographical stalactite, tear in the corn-field fraught landscape slowly searing it’s way a half-keel off center. He has enough time. He knows the general direction. With a muffled gallop the engine whirs to life as his weight shuffles, his knuckles grip the wheel and spool it in the southern direction, making a giant U. He finds himself at the gas station, buying smokes.
He grapples
the hose like some southern ministry tackling the sleeves of snakes in an act
of faith. He fills up the side of his tank with half of the funds crumpled into
the side of his pocket. He purchases a pack of Camel Turkish Gold, spanking the
back of the pack the way his friend Patrick instructed him when he was sixteen,
and tobacco was the forbidden fruit branched behind the counter of americana
gas stations. He purchases a slender reddish box of Swisher blunts. With sliced
strides he cuts into the parking lot. In his pocket is the lighter he has used
over a year ago, then bluish lighter with purple acne riddled across the
cylinder side. The lighter that he purchased over a year ago in Appleton when
Megan suggested that they go out and find cigarettes.
He drives. Firing the slightly cinnamon tinged
rolled cardboard, allowing it to seep into his lips, he drives, not looking in
the mirror to notice the stream of traffic flowing the opposite direction, back
down the waterslide hill, near the battlements of Jumer’s lodge, deep, into the
Southern valley, near Manual and the broken gutter of his grade school, he
continues to drive, the opposite direction, propelling his past behind him in
muffled exhaust smoke, in streams of exhaled nicotine. He drives, not sure at
first which direction he is going, knowing only that he direly needs to leave.
Knowing only that he direly needs to leave the place where he has already been,
the place that has nourished his dented dreams, the place that has showcased
his broken travails and shallow hearted promises.
He is driving. Smoking, allowing
the cigarettes to seep into this gums. The taste of coffee settling in his
mouth, swigged generously from the gratis CEFCU mug in between drags. He is
driving leaving, tracing the grayish blurred streak; the coated cement slab
that paved before him, not noticing the signs that fuse out of the ground like
husks of harvested corn, rustic botanies blossoming with painted direction,
telling him when to halt, numerically informing him the name of the highway he
is currently traversing. Larger billiard size placards spread across the
prairie grass to his right. Signs shouting out the name of prodigal Indian
tribes. Signs indicating the miles in which he has yet to go.
His vehicle cracks open the slice
of road, mowing further north into that place where the cabbage tufted trees
reflect the golden specks of the sun. The trees optically displaying their swan
song in tinted shades of burgundy hues the color of malt wine. Thick branches
dripping slightly south with flecks of autumn scattering off the craggy finger
branches, bowing their curtain call to the sun, the sewer of all viability. A
kaleidoscopic orange hurtles flares of fireball leaves; sallow yellow patches
shoot into elongated infinity of everything in this world somehow he has been fortunate enough to have lost.
.
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