by Jim Dodge
‘Well,’ I offered, ‘how about a spin around the block?’
He shook his head doggedly. ‘Nope, better not.’
‘Okay, how’s this: I’ll watch the station – I’ve pumped lots of gas in my time – and you take it for a short ride.’ I was determined. ‘Lock up the cash box if you want. I’ll make change out of my own pocket.’
As he considered this, I could feel how much he wanted to do it, but finally he said, ‘Naw, I just can’t risk it – getting fired by Mr Hoffer, beat on by Daddy. But much obliged for offering. Honest.’
‘Tell you what,’ I persisted, now maniacal. ‘Why don’t you drive me around to the men’s room. I’ve never been chauffeured to the pisser before, and at least you’ll get a taste of this fine piece of automotion.’
‘Yeah,’ he grinned, ‘I could do that. Sure. Great!’
He was so happy I felt like giving him the damn thing and taking the Greyhound back home. I’ve never seen anyone more delighted by a fifty-foot drive in my life. I took my time pissing, and when I came out he was sitting behind the wheel running the power windows up and down. I almost had to use a tire-iron to pry him out.
I wasn’t hungry – they don’t call bennies diet pills for nothing – but I knew from my days of high-balling speed that if you run your gut on empty too long it’ll start eating itself, so I stopped at a drive-in joint down the road and dutifully choked down a 30¢ Deluxe Burger and an order of fries that tasted like greased cardboard.
The whole time I was eating I thought about the bottle of benzedrine under the seat. When I drove long-haul it was my habit to reward myself for eating food by eating a handful of speed for dessert, and the old pleasure center never forgets a pattern. I wanted some and told myself no. Instead I cracked another beer and congratulated myself on steadfastness in the face of temptation while I rinsed down the grease and thought some more about the young woman in North Beach.
When I reached in my jacket pocket for her self-addressed postcard, my fingertips brushed the crinkled ball of tinfoil I’d forgotten about – her tender gift, the LSD. Inside were three sugar cubes, their edges crumbled. I remembered her advice about taking one at a time in a beautiful place. Bradley’s Burger Pit in Barstow didn’t seem like a beautiful place, and I still owed Natalie Hurley of 322 Bryant Street a deserved apology. Using the dash for a desk, I printed in small, firm letters:
Dear Natalie,
I lied to you and your friend. I’m not Jack Kerouac. My motives for such deceit were complex – joy, fear, meanness, and self-protection. I regret my thoughtlessness and disrespect to both of you and hope you’ll accept my sincere apologies.
Sincerely,
The Big Bopper
I shook my head at this perversity and diligently inked the Bopper’s name into a thick black rectangle. Underneath I managed to cramp in ‘Love, George.’
It was a clear night, moonless, the temperature warm but cooling fast. Mirage shimmers of rising heat off the desert made the horizon appear to be under water. The highway was as straight as the shortest distance between two points and flat as a grade-setter’s vision of heaven. I powered down all the windows, locked the needle on 100, and took it south.
An hour or so later I hit the junction of 62 around Yucca Valley and ripped on down to Interstate 10, stopping in Indio for gas. From Barstow on, my brain had been cruising entranced, but the Indio pit stop had broken the spell. Back on the road, the twitters, skreeks, and jangles of speed-comedown rapidly became unbearable. A brackish exhaustion now stained my attention, my eyes felt like dried pudding, and I grew increasingly distracted, restless, and bored bored bored. I’d been up for a couple of days, one of them chemically aided, and it was catching up hard.
To resist temptation once you’ve already eliminated it is always easy, but to resist it when it’s within easy reach under the front seat is difficult – especially when you’ve passed the soft flirtations of desire and are down to raw need and can hear those little go-fast pills squealing ‘Eat me, eat me.’ Difficult, yes, but not impossible, not if you’re strong. I resisted the magnetic siren song of benzedrine by fumbling the tinfoil package from my pocket and letting a sugar cube dissolve on my tongue – a sweet, cloying trickle sliding down my throat.
Nothing happened. I should’ve known better. You can’t expect the young to provide reliable drugs. But I was careful. I didn’t know anything about LSD except what I’d heard, and most of what I’d heard had come from people like Allen Pound, a kid who drove graveyard at Cravetti’s. He’d taken some with a psychiatrist in Berkeley, he said, and it turned him every way but loose. A bookcase became a brickwall. When he rested his forehead against a window, half his head went through without disturbing the glass; he’d felt the cold air outside stinging his eyes while, back in the room, his ears were burning. Always curious, I’d sidled into the conversation and asked him if LSD was like peyote. He smiled one of those cool, knowing smiles that afflict the terminally hip and replied, ‘Is a Harley like a Cushman?’
So, even though I suspected Allen Pound of self-inflating bullshit, I was careful. I waited almost seventy miles worth of crumbling nerves before I ate the second cube. Either this had something in it or the stars, like tiny volcanoes, began erupting on their own, spewing molten tendrils of color until the night sky was an entangling net of jewels.
Nothing is more tedious than someone else’s acid trip, so I’ll spare you the cosmic insights – except for the real obvious stuff, like it’s all one (more or less), composed wholly of holy parts, the sum of which is no greater or less than the individual gifts of possibility, all wrapped up pretty in the bright ribbon of past and future, the ribbon of moonlit highway, the spiral ribbons of amino acids twining into the quick and the dead, the ribbon of sound unwinding its endless music through breath and horn, the silver dancer with ribbons in her hair. Oh man, I was out there marching to Peoria, aeons out, all fucked up.
I made two intelligent moves, both making up in smarts what they so obviously lacked in grace. First I got off the road. Simply cranked the wheel hard right and drove into the desert, slewing between cactus plants till the exploding Godzilla eyes of on-coming traffic disappeared. Then, once the Caddy stopped, I tumbled out the door and jammed a finger down my throat. Maybe it wasn’t too late to puke up the second hit. Of course, maybe I hadn’t double-dosed, maybe the first was just a blank. But then again, maybe the shit came on slow. I didn’t care; I just wanted to get as much of it as possible out of my system before my brain became a bowl of onion dip at a Rotarian no-host cocktail party. I managed to gag up the sour remains of the gristle burger and cardboard fries in a slurry of beer. My mind was vomit on the alkaline sand, as indifferently illuminated by the starlight as anything else of matter made.
I rolled onto my back and watched the stars pulse till I could get my breath. Watched them erupt, swirl, and dissolve like so many specks of sugar in the belly of the universe, only to re-precipitate, glittering. I felt what I always feel when I really look at the stars and remember they are enormous furnaces of light, when I look past them and imagine how many billions more exist beyond vision because their light hasn’t yet reached us or they’re obscured behind the curve of space, only now I felt this with an unbearable clarity, the impossible magnitude of it all, my own self barely a twitch of existence, a speck of sugar dissolving in the gut, fuel for the furnace, food for us fools. I forced myself to quit looking (otherwise I’d die) and curled up, trembling, on the hot desert sand. Eyes clamped shut, I sat on the bank and watched the river burn. Felt my empty body lifted on a wave, lifted on the wind, hurled into the darkness to be lifted again.
I have no idea how many eternities I required to regather myself and re-open my eyes. The stars were stars again, but possibly they wouldn’t stay that way if I kept looking, so I cautiously peered sideways across the cactus-studded plain. I don’t know what kind of cactus these were, but they vaguely resembled stick figures, legs together in a single line, arms cu
rving up from each side in an ambiguous gesture of either jubilation or surrender. They looked like sentries – not so much guardians, though, as passive observers, witnesses for some unfathomable conscience. Nonetheless I was trying to fathom it when one of the arms moved. I started crawling pronto for the white shimmer of the Eldorado. I reached up to seize the door handle and put my hand right through the starlight mirage of metal. In a panicked glance over my shoulder I saw more cactus limbs move, but, daring a longer look, saw they were staying put, not advancing, and my fear began fading into a very careful curiosity. It took me a few baffled moments to comprehend that the cactuses were dancing to a music I could neither hear nor imagine. I knew that if I wanted to know their music, I would have to join their dance and feel it in the movement of my mortal meat, within time and space, outside in.
I know I danced, but remember neither the movements nor the music. Or anything else until I came to in the front seat of the Cadillac with sweat in my eyes. The sun was up with a passion. I checked the dash clock – 9:30. I felt like scorched jelly. Need sleep, my brain was flashing; I hadn’t begun to scrape myself from the floor of exhaustion. But the Caddy threw the thickest shade around, and even with all the windows down it was an oven. I had to move. I sat up and turned the key, so wasted that for the pain to reach my brain took about ten seconds. I yelped, hands recoiling to my chest. I examined them dully. They were pin-cushioned with cactus spines. Sweat-blinded and on the verge of screaming, I yanked the spines with my teeth and spit them out the window, thinking distantly to myself that if someone were watching they’d probably say, ‘Now, he’s fucked-up: got enough money to afford a fancy car, then parks in the desert and eats his hands for breakfast.’
Even with the spines removed, my hands were almost unbearably tender. I examined them carefully to make sure I’d removed all the needles, then gingerly reached under the front seat for the bottle of bennies. I wasn’t tempted. Can you say a drowning man is tempted by a life-preserver? Temptation was crushed by necessity. Besides, it’s all one, ceaselessly changing to sustain the dynamic equilibrium that maintains itself through change. And that dynamic equilibrium requires human effort. We each have to do what we can. I did seven.
Tuned me right up, too – had those acid-warped synapses firing at top dead center in no time. For example, I remembered the beer in the trunk. The ice was all melted but the water was still cool. I drank two quickly, tasted the next two, and savored another as I lumbered the Caddy back onto the highway.
The next sixty miles were devoted to severe self-questioning of the round-and-round variety. In retrospect I’d been foolish, first of all, to take the LSD, and then to take more. On the other hand, as that old saying has it, when you’re up to your ass in alligators it’s hard to remember you only wanted to drain the swamp. And what’s an adventure without risk, danger, daring? Excitement was the whole point, in a way. Or was I secretly afraid of accepting the responsibility of delivering the gift, that deep down I knew it was an insignificant gesture, a spasm of fake affirmation in an indifferent universe? I didn’t have a fucking clue.
And from this speed-lashed tautological self-analysis, only vaguely slowed by beer, out of a puddle of confusion I created a whirlpool of doubt; despite the energetic rush of amphetamine confidence, I felt myself sucked down toward depression. There’s no drug stronger than reality, John Seasons once told me, because reality, despite our arrogant, terrified, hopeful insistence, doesn’t require our perceptions, merely our helpless presence. I debated the truth of this all the way to the Arizona border. Finally I pulled over and banged my head against the steering wheel to make myself stop thinking.
I started with a light, rhythmic tapping, but that only seemed to increase the babble in my brain and I did it harder, hard enough to hurt. Then I slumped back in the seat, gasping, eyes tightly closed, and immediately had a vision: a tiny orange man, maybe three inches tall, naked, was carrying what appeared to be a piece of glossy black plywood as big as he was across a thin black line suspended in space. He was walking anxiously back and forth on the line, intently peering down. The plywood was cut roughly in the shape of an artist’s palette, but lacked a thumbhole. The shape strongly reminded me of something personal, but was obscured in a shroud of associations. Finally it came to me: chicken pox, seven years old, an image of Hopalong Cassidy astride his horse. That was it, a jigsaw puzzle, a piece of Hoppy’s black shirt.
The tiny man, the color of a neon tangerine, was still aimlessly walking back and forth along the line, his eyes shifting between the line and the plywood. It wasn’t until he turned and walked away from me for a moment that I realized the black line was the edge of a surface, and looking more closely I saw it was a thin slab of crystal suspended in the air; it was exactly at eye level, and without the black line on its upper margin, I might’ve missed it completely. I tried to stretch myself up to see over its edge, get a better view of the surface the little orange man was stalking, but I couldn’t break the angle of sight.
I watched, fascinated, as he roamed back and forth, looking all around, occasionally setting the piece of plywood down and sliding it around with his toe, then picking it up to continue what was evidently a search. I strained again to see the surface, but my gaze was locked dead level with the crystal edge and the parallel black line above it, a shadow laminated to translucence. At last I grasped the obvious: the little orange man was working on some crazy fucking jigsaw puzzle.
By the way he moved, lugging the puzzle piece as big as he was, it was plain he had no idea where it fit and, judging from his tight jaw, was becoming increasingly frustrated. I desperately wanted to scan the puzzle, to see what was done so far and what the emerging image might suggest, but despite one last effort of fierce concentration I couldn’t see beyond the edge. I wanted to offer the little orange man my help, add my vision to his, but there wasn’t much I could do. I decided, though, that I could at least encourage him, and had just opened my mouth to speak when all hell broke loose.
I guess I should say all heaven broke loose, because the sky opened and poured rain, rivers and tidal waves of it, a deluge. The little man lifted the piece of puzzle above his head for what meager shelter it offered. I was sure he’d be washed away. But as abruptly as it’d started, the rain stopped, and he immediately returned to his work, even more intently, as if the torrential downpour had washed the image clean. Then the hail began, chunks of ice the size of tennis balls. Again the orange man took cover by lifting the puzzle piece above his head, staggering under the hammerstroke force of the blows, grimacing at the deafening roar, his tiny penis flopping against his thigh as he struggled to stay upright. The moment the ice-storm abated, the wind came up in huge gusts that sent him reeling almost to the edge before he was able to hunker down behind his piece of the puzzle, the power of the wind bending it over him like a shell. No sooner had the wind eased than lightning fractured the sky, fat blue-white bolts sizzling toward his head. He lifted the puzzle piece to deflect the stunning power of the bolts, spun by the brain-wrenching blasts of thunder that instantly followed, and I was already laughing by the time the tomatoes started splatting down, followed by a literal shit-storm of raw sewage, then writhing clumps of maggots, large gobs of spit, and decayed fruit. Once the fusillade of cream pies ended, I was tear blind and gasping for breath, doubled up on the front seat of the Caddy. I swear by all that’s holy that I was laughing with him, not at him; laughing in true sympathy for all of us caught, tiny and naked and nearly helpless, in the maelstrom of forces we can’t control. This was the laughter of honest commiseration, of true celebration for the splendid and foolish tenacity that keeps us hanging on despite the blows.
When I finally managed to look again, the little orange man was still standing there, resolutely holding the battered piece of the puzzle above his head even though the sky was clear. He was looking directly at me, glaring. His lips moved, but there was no sound – he looked like a goldfish pressed against the aquarium’s glass, working
water through his gills. It took a couple of heartbeats for his voice to reach the interior of the Caddy, to break with a deafening boom that rocked the car on its springs and flattened my lungs. He vanished with the sonic blast, but when my hearing returned a few moments later his words were waiting for me, not shrill or angry or bitter or even very loud, but absolutely corrosive with disdain: ‘That’s right, you idiot – laugh.’
‘Fuck you!’ I screamed back, enraged by the injustice of his flagrant misunderstanding. ‘You don’t know shit!’ There was no reply.
Seething, I fired up the Eldorado and aimed it down the road, yelling, ‘How could you say that? I was laughing with you. Completely with you.’ But even righteously wronged, I heard the false note in ‘completely.’ I was laughing with him, at least 80 percent, and another 10 percent from relief that it wasn’t me, and another 10 percent just because it was funny. So even if my claim wasn’t completely true, it was true enough, and I didn’t deserve his contempt. ‘You mean little orange shithead!’ I railed. ‘Jerk! Who are you to judge my laughter? You know I would’ve helped you if I could. That black piece shaped like a palette – it’s part of Hopalong Cassidy’s shirt. I put that one together when I was seven, you asshole.’
By then I was tapering off to mutters, the dull throb in my skull reminding me I’d been beating my head against the steering wheel, and I twisted the rearview mirror around to check for damage. Fear hit me like a hell-bound freight. It wasn’t the small lump or little smear of blood that jolted me. It was my eyes. They were crazy.
