About A Girl

I have lived a life unlike any other, a life I am opposed to understanding, the details of which, however, I will gladly share. But this story isn’t really about me.

When I was younger, in high school, my sophomore or junior year, I knew a girl. I slept with her; I slept with her a lot, so I’d say that I knew her pretty well. I'm almost certain that I was in love with her, probably because she was my first. It wasn’t that I’d never slept with anyone else, but we did it right, it meant something. Of course, I was just a kid; I don’t know now what that means now, so I guarantee you that I didn’t know then.

If I could paint her the way that I saw her, you'd never peel your eyes from the canvas again. She was older than I am now, 23 or 24 years old when I met her. I am guessing at this, because I was under the impression she was not quite ten years older than I was. I never really knew for sure, because I never asked. I honestly didn't care; however, she was beautiful in a way that a thousand volumes of intricately spun text could never come near explaining.

I wish I could really describe her, because everything about her changed so often. Seldom did she have the same hair color, and all of her styles seem to change almost daily. Nothing cosmetic stayed the same, her makeup, and her perfume (Although I remember Sunflowers, or a cheap knock off of Sunflowers that lingered in the air behind her). Scent is the strongest sense tied to memory, isn’t it? Her eye color seemed to change from day to day; often they were a soft blue, almost grey color. I just remember how striking they were. They sat on a perfectly sculpted face, slightly round cheeks and a soft jaw line, all of which wound around a perfect, if not slightly crooked nose.

Her body was perfect, and I can say so without any hesitation or qualification. She didn't have the body of a model; although she was tall and slender, with a somewhat athletic build, she had the slight curves in the places that mattered. Her shoulders were slightly rounded, her arms toned. Her bust was full and ample, but not over large. Her hips came out just right to give her that highly sought after hour-glass shape, which lent to a perfectly shaped apple bottom. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was so very afraid she would go away, that somehow I would lose her. As if she was my property and I couldn't bear anyone taking her from me, yet this compulsion ran so much deeper. I could never understand exactly why she was with me, but I wasn't about to let her go.

Now, I could tell you stories, many of which you’d never believe, though, some I have to tell you or none of this is will make sense. The tales I could spin about my junior year in high school, doing so many things, with the person that I did them with. The term 'legendary' comes to mind, or perhaps 'notorious'. I would write a novel about that year, just that year, which you’d never put down. I would if I could write that is. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, unfortunately, I made different choices.

We did amazing things; I mean everything we did was amazing, even the cute little couple things. You know those things that couples do, the zoo, and picnics in the park, or dinner and a show; although those things didn’t happen often. We talked a lot about life and the future, and everything that is something which became everything. Somehow I don’t think I ever slept the entire time I was with her; I couldn’t have gotten more than a few hours of scattered sleep here and there. I somehow kept up on and survived school, for the most part; but I wasn’t going to need school. We were going to run away, live like artists, travel the world, and maybe become the next Bonnie & Clyde.

When she smoked, it was beautiful. When I smoked, it was to be closer to her, to have something in common with her. We’d drive for miles and miles with music blaring until we lost our voices, until only a rasping, grating sounds were all we could muster. We’d scream into the night until I could almost taste blood. We made movies, insane stories about misguided youth committing suicide, murder, or some other atrocity. Almost every movie we made had some scene of awkward sexual encounters, and frustration. A great excuse to have sex on camera, it’s too bad she’d destroy them as soon as we finished, still panting and out of breath. They were wonderful, and beautiful. She was gorgeous. It was so good, life was good.

Of course, this whole thing won’t make any sense unless I start at the beginning.

There was a venue downtown, on First Avenue. Not the big venue on the corner of First and 7^th, but a smaller café, down just a few blocks between 5th and 4th Streets. At the time, this was my, and many other young messed up teens, favorite place in the world. A small coffee lounge by day, a small coffee lounge with small cramped stage converted from old useless loading dock by night. It’s really too bad it’s gone now, because it was the sort of place we all expected to become iconic.

This venue was the perfect setting for the most intimate of shows; mostly small local punk and metal bands played almost every night of the week. Every so often, as often as the shop owners could afford, a bigger, not really mainstream, but very popular in the underground band would be booked, and the house would be packed until near bursting. I'm certain local fire codes were definitely not being observed.

You need to envision, first of all, the worst most despicable shade of green you can, not a sea-foam, and not a midnight green, not too dark, and not too light, but just the most perfect terrible green. If you close your eyes and think of the furniture that lingered around from the 70’s into the 90’s and into the turn of the century, faded and lackluster, and you see that color of degraded, depressed green, which would be the color of the concrete walls of this former loading bay.

The entirety of this claustrophobic space couldn’t have been more than the size of your high school science classroom, depending, of course, on where you went to high school. It wasn’t a logical geometric shape, either, when you came in through the door that led in from the café, you would find 90° angles on the long wall to the right, and this would be the farthest wall from the door. On the left, however, would be a the short wall, a few feet from the door, a light angle led to the wall, which led to the almost 45° angle of the stage that stretched out directly in front of you. The old rolling metal garage door remained behind the stage; a remnant of it’s useful past. It wasn’t worth replacing or removing, that would have been too expensive, but at least it too was painted with the same putrid green, making it stand out just that much less.

The ugliest aspect to this concoction, much uglier than the ancient beat-up thrift-store couches against the long wall taking up valuable standing room, was the giant square pillars standing in the middle of the room. Haphazardly placed, all three were bright white at the top, and that white continued down until you reached the highest point at which someone could jump, there you found the scuff marks from shoes and God knows what else, getting thicker and blacker the closer to the floor your eyes fell. They were extraordinary.

One night in particular, one of the biggest underground punk bands you could think of came into town and played right there at our little venue. The place was bursting at the seams, and by the time we arrived, my friend and I. It was impossible to get to the front, the best place to be. That is where you got the war wounds, the mar and damage you’d collect while jumping, kicking, and fighting under the watchful eye of your eidolon, screaming their guts out on stage; these were badges you wore for weeks on end. All the people you knew, who didn’t go, and those who did, but were too afraid to join the mosh, would fawn over you, proclaiming you the local god in their eyes. You had a story to tell, it was a rush; it was pride. It was worth it.

With the sheer volume of human bodies grinding about in the blaring, impelling blasts of musical carnage, the heat would rise. As the heat rose, so would the humidity. Before long it would rain, small droplets of sweat would bead and fall from the cold concrete ceiling, and despite the hygienic issues, no one cared in the least, being drenched in their own sweat, it never seemed to matter that they were also being drenched in everyone else’s too. It was disgusting and beautiful all at once.

The details of the layout shop in the front I don’t remember quite as well. There was an old lunch counter ripped straight out of the 1950's, with stainless steel tube trimming, and the old holes in the floor from there the red vinyl stools would have been, long since filled in with cement, and covered over a speckled green vinyl tile, small depressions hint at the post and the bolts that held it in place. They were the lunch counters you'd see in a Social Studies text book, with a caption under the photo that would read, 'Segregation meant that Whites and Blacks were not allowed to eat together.'

On that old lunch counter were at least half a dozen glass cases, probably purchased at various auctions and going-out-of-business sales. None of them matched, but all of them were filled with candy, pastries, and other treats. One of them was refrigerated, trendy soda brands lined up front to back. The wall behind the counter was distinguishing, as well, a mirror running the extent of the wall, framed by crystal clear light bulbs, those miniature ones like you’d see on classic theater marquees, except these didn’t chase each other, although I suspected they would have, if given the opportunity.

The entry to the café was recessed; up a set of stairs just outside the interior door to the foyer were a few apartments, and offices. I always wondered who could live there, while constant thundering music literally shook the place to its aging foundation. Even out on the street in the front you could sometimes hear the music it seemed, more clearly than you could inside.

At the front of the shop were all the tables and the booths, and a few couches positioned perfectly for a more intimate coffee drinking experience. In one booth against the front windows sat a girl, alone. She held a cup of coffee and a cigarette in one hand, and her own head in the other. Her hair fell through her fingers, over her knuckles, and cascaded down over her face.

I was there with a good friend, actually my best friend. We had gotten separated in the crowd, when I decided that I needed some air. There was a voice that told me to turn around. That voice was the smart one, the one I like to listen to. I stepped out of the humid tropical milieu into the 10° lower temperature and slightly quieter café. The pressure from the bass dissipated and I was free again.

I saw her right away, looking at me, she had caught me looking at her, or I caught her looking at me. This is just semantics, really. I have often wondered if she had a voice in her head too, one that told her to look at me, to see me standing there, that I was watching her. She looked away quickly, being nonchalant, inviting me. That voice told me to go to her; I love that voice, the one that tells me to do good things, or things that become good. Maybe it’s strange that I hear voices.

Go to her.

I walked to her, looking as cool as I could. Was I asleep, or dreaming; a dream of waking, perhaps a waking dream? She was too beautiful to notice me. That’s when my buddy caught me up, grabbing me by the sleeve of my trendy punk rock hoody. He drug me back into the show, screaming something about somebody kicking ass, and my needing to see it. Sometimes, it seems, I don’t have a choice.

Suddenly I was back in the grips of the driving bass beat, the pounding guitar licks, the screams of an angry kid, barely older than me, all tearing at my ear drums. I had to admit that I was relieved, in the moments since I’d seen her I had a chance to come to my senses, realizing that I was no more capable of talking to her than willing myself invisible. I imagined the crashing freight train, derailed by a single penny, and the parallels were remarkable.

It was only another ten minutes before I wanted to leave again, this wasn’t my show, I didn’t want to see it. I was there because it seemed the lesser of two evils. I had no interest in being at home. It was too confining in that back room, I wanted that freedom again. An open field, the ocean, to breathe freely, then there was that that voice again. I turned around, and there she was, standing at the back of the room, against the terrible green, alone. She looked the part, dressed right, hair right, gorgeous, but somehow, she seemed like the right piece in the wrong puzzle. She looked at me, thick streaks of mascara poured down her face, I couldn’t tell if it was the sweat raining down, or if she was crying.

Go to her.

I walked to her, again, wondering with every step what I could possibly say, what I could possibly do, but there was nothing. L'esprit des escaliers, the spirit of the stairs, I could see this quickly becoming one of those situations. The French use this term when there is something that happens and you stumble for something to say but nothing good comes out, and later when you are walking away, down the stairs of the apartment, you realize what you should have said. I heard this from a writer I admire, it always stuck with me, I think it’s because I don’t understand how the French could coin such a simple term for that a convoluted situation. I don't try to understand the French.

As I was about to astound her with my wit, she grabbed me by the arm, and shouted in my ear that we had to leave. We blew past the bouncer stamping hands at the door, past the dirty bathrooms with the writing on the walls I never mentioned, through the café and past the old lunch counter, and out the foyer leading to the apartments and offices, and onto the street in front. It was cold, not quite freezing cold, not quite winter, yet. It was cold enough that you needed a sweatshirt, or something with long sleeves, unless you were a girl trying to non-conform like everyone else. Then you wore something with straps, something that showed off the bra you were or weren’t wearing. She weren’t. I was o.k. with that. I wouldn’t need l’esprit des escaliers; I wouldn’t need to think of something to say. This wouldn’t be the last time that she would ruin one of my carefully unprepared speeches.

Safely out front, in the sharp biting air, our breath almost showing, wisps disappearing in the night as soon as they’re expelled, so you aren’t sure that you’ve seen them, but you have. I looked around, it was almost, Halloween, all hallows eve, and the stores along the downtown street were decked in their finest oranges and browns. There were pumpkins and witches, black cats, white ghosts, and all the tacky décor of the season. A clothier opposite us, long since closed for the day, windows dark, chose the more timid approach of celebrating autumn with fall leaves and colors, the less offensive escape, right from the pages of that great book, How NOT to Piss Anyone Off, another book I'd write, if I could write.

She asked me if I had a car.

When you work in customer service, or sales, or management, any job that requires you to be in control of communication, you are taught how to answer questions. This is important, so pay attention. There are times when someone might ask you ask you a question, and if you answer that question too quickly, the remainder of the conversation becomes pointless. No matter how skillfully you try, nothing you say will be heard. They become oblivious to any other point you might have to make. Unfortunately, the first thing I said was yes. The second thing was that it was in the lot down the street. I wasn’t exactly on my game.

As she dragged me down First Avenue, almost running, I tried explaining, shouting ahead to her, that I’d come with a friend, and that he had the cash for parking. Tripping over cracked concrete, flying down the sidewalk, I was pleading, telling her that he wouldn’t have any way home, and that he’d be more than a little upset with me for ditching him. We stopped and she looked at me, and shoved a wad of twenties into my hand. Leaning forward, she kissed me, then leaning just a bit further she whispered in my ear she told me that we had to go, the puff of each breath in my ear as she panted, matching the pounding of my heart throbbing in my head. How could I argue with that? By that I mean, why would I argue with that? By that I mean, we got in my car and drove.

We drove for hours, neither of us spoke, we just were. Somehow we ended up God knows where, miles from anything except farm fields and abandoned dirt roads. Ender the moonlight, and the stars we made love. It was surreal, yet nothing had ever felt so real to me before. In the middle of nowhere, she made me make a promise. She said that if either one of us ever died, no matter what, the other would walk away, and never looked back.

I kept my promise, I didn’t look back.

That night, alone in the car with this girl he had just met, he had a dream. Nothing mattered, he was in her arms, she was in his, and everything was well, but his dream still bothered him.

He stood, or sat, alone in a dark room. White walls, a cold concrete floor, and one overhead lamp hanging in the middle swaying slowly set a mood. It must have been a low wattage bulb, because he couldn’t really see anything, and without any windows to help, he felt like he was squinting. Have you ever felt another person in a room with you, even if you couldn’t see them? That unnerving feeling haunted the kid throughout the dream. Just as something was about to happen, a voice in the room, clearly came the word ‘why’, and he woke up.

The girl told him her name was Caitlin, her name was Caitlin and she was homeless. She told him about some of amazing things she had done, how she had lived over the last several years since she dropped out of high school. She told him stories of the places that she’d gone, and what she’d done there. She told him about some of her plans to make a difference in the world. He didn’t ask a lot of questions, she didn’t seem interested in sharing the details of her life, just the overview. He just stuck with the rare bit of intuition he ever had, that if he were to start asking questions, she might become upset with him.

The first night he knew her, she snuck into his bedroom window with him at around 3 or 4 a.m. She was gone before the sun came up again, but she didn’t go far. Later that day he got a call from his dad, who was always a bit out of it. He was staying there for a while, and when he had left for work he noticed a beautiful young girl in the back of his son’s car. It was 5 or 6 hours later when the dad called. It was a short conversation, and it didn’t really matter.

She never talked about her family, never told the boy where she was from. He was content with that. The kid once got up the courage to ask her about her past. He asked one time, and one time only. When he asked, all the color in her face disappeared. She looked at him and he almost expected to see a river of rainbows pouring from her eyes, instead of the clear saline of her tears.

She told him that he already knew who she was, she was Caitlin, and that should be enough, but it was obvious that wasn’t enough. She saw that he was still wanting, something, some little bit that he could keep, something he could use to remind himself that she was real. She told him that Keats had said that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ And then she asked him, what if the truth wasn’t beautiful, but if in fact the truth was so ugly it couldn’t be the truth at all?

In one of his rare moments of brilliance he said that the trick of it all was to find the beauty behind the truth, and that he had. With this she just stared into his eyes, and he knew that this was a stalemate. He never asked her again, he knew he’d never win. And in this he could feel the story of his life: why try?

I lived in a suburb, a decently big, sprawling city, a mixture of new and old. There was a river where most of the older houses were built, and fields of what used to be farmland, slowly being swallowed under the development of housing to suit the needs of the families that needed to get away from the urban jungle, trading their short commutes for bigger houses, prestigious homes they could show off to the world. Where the housing was being built, retail was following, trying to get closer to the money these people pretended to have.

This was a very peculiar vantage; my city was being developed, like many of the cities around it. But some of the surrounding towns were still the same old farming communities they had always been, and some just weren’t sure what they were doing. The prospect of new tax payers, new business, and new revenue was hard to turn down. The line between urban, suburban, and rural was being blurred all around. I was just happy that a new movie theater, and mini mall was being built less than 5 minutes away, and that I wouldn’t need to drive near as far to catch the new zombie flicks and Slasher films.

I had been unfortunate enough to date, for a short time, the daughter of the mayor of the farming town neighboring my own. It fell into the category of small staying small, re-electing him term after term because he never ran opposed. All of that is a great story, for another time.

Without going into details, I was made aware of a house that sat dormant. An old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a mile and a half off of the county road running through the sprawling farm land, and on the end of a series lonely dirt roads. It was secluded in every sense of the term, even though there was civilization just over the horizon. It was a beautiful place, fully furnished, but abandoned for years. From what I had gleaned, it belonged to an old woman who had finally passed away, and her son inherited the house and never did anything with it, living on one of the coasts and enjoying a remarkably successful life, he didn't even attend her funeral. It’s a morose story, but these things happen.

The house was filled with the relics of someone’s past, or several someone's pasts. Furniture lasts for years, out living owners, being bought and sold or given away. For the beginning of its life, it is new and shiny, and people buy it because they want it. Over time, those people buy new things, selling or donating their old relics to someone who might not be able to, or want to, afford the new and shiny. Its luster dulls and fades, and over time, it changes hands, eventually, because of its age, and its style, someone will spend more on it, wanting it because it’s old. Imagine a life cycle that complex, loved for your entire existence, but for different reasons all along.

This was where we lived. By the end of the first month I knew her, we were squatting. We basically moved in together the third day we knew each other, but that really meant that she snuck in my window every night, it really didn't count as living together. The house didn’t have any electricity, but there was a nearly full L.P. tank in the back so we had heat, and could cook some. Although most of the time we ate with friends or out somewhere. Really, we only slept there most of the time. We slept, and did the other things you do at night. Otherwise we were out, living life, and it didn’t matter as long as we were together. Does that sound sappy?

I really wish that I had the time that it would take to tell you about everything we did. I remember it all with such vivid detail. Even though it wasn’t even a year that I was with her, it felt like an eternity, an entire lifetime within a lifetime. I can tell you, again without hesitation, that it was the greatest time in my life. When I think about it now, though, it was the stepping stone for the rest of my life, for everything that came after.

As the months went on, we got crazier, did more outrageous and incredible things. After a while, robbery, breaking and entering, and vandalism became our celebrity. We wanted to do things that meant something, symbolic and beautiful. We wanted to destroy everything we thought was evil, but we wanted the wake of our damage to say something, to tell others of that evil that we were out to get them. We would destroy corporate sculptures, and break into big retail stores and destroy displays. We’d even set fire to big business coffee shops, so I should add arson to the list of dirty deeds as well.

We did things that spoke, actions that would tell the world how they were wrong. We weren’t out to hurt anyone, and to my knowledge, we never did. Of course, I’m sure these words have been spoken throughout history by the wicked in the name of some higher duty. Close your eyes and think of something you don’t like and what you would want to do to it, and that's what we did. Our messages were small, and on reflection, I'm sure they were rarely heard, but to us it was the rush, we were changing the world one small piece at a time.

Near the end, though, things started to change. Something in her started to change, she seemed to withdraw. We didn’t slow down. We didn’t hold back, and I wasn’t sure if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing; it was such a gradual change. I’m not really sure how to describe what was happening; everything was exactly the same, but entirely different all at once.

I'm not sure if this will make sense, but the way it felt reminded me of a time when I was called to the principal's office in elementary school. I walked in and found several teachers, the school nurse and the parents of one of my classmates as well as my own mother all crammed in around the desk. I was asked to sit. The entire time, I felt they knew something I didn’t. It turned out that my classmate, Rebecca, had claimed I was 'sexually harassing' her. It was an absolute lie, mainly because I didn't even talk to her at all, content to hang out with all my guy friends, and, it turned out years later, she'd said it to get my attention. But the way I felt that day is the way I was feeling about Caitlin.

One day, the kid went to school, catching a ride with a buddy, since his car was sitting in a parking lot at the movie theater nearest his house. Having spent the night at the buddy’s house the night before, and since he hadn’t seen the love of his life in nearly 32 hours, he ditched out of class only two hours into the day. He took another friends car, a pristine 1979 Mustang Ghia Hatchback with a 5.0 Liter V8, 302 Cubic Inch engine, 4-speed manual transmission, and what he considered a sexy amount of power behind to the wheels. The police liaison tried to follow him, but his late eighties Dodge Caravan with D.A.R.E painted across the side didn’t seem to have the spirit to keep up.

Safely ditching the Mustang, and back in his pre-S.U.V., a massive '78 GMC Jimmy, he made the journey home, not to his parents place, but that old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It took about 15 minutes from the movie theater to get there, and most of that time was spent on back roads, the sound of dirt packing and gravel being crushed under the massive tires of his truck. It was almost therapeutic, which was good because the radio had been stolen only a few weeks earlier, leaving him to go out of his mind without music to sooth his soul.

Have you ever had one of those feelings creep up on you so subtly that you almost didn’t notice it until it was drumming on your heart and in your ears like the beat of a war drum? Then, you get another feeling, the one where you realize the first, and it’s almost like your insides drop out of you. That’s how he felt pulling up the drive and around the back to where they parked to hide their cars, which was just to be safe, because no one else drove out here ever.

Her car was sitting there, but closer to the house than it was when he'd last left, and facing the other way. This was strange, but nowhere near as strange as the boxes occupying the majority of the volume of her back seat, the hatch, and passenger seat, the latter he hadn’t noticed until he walked by on the way to the old screen door on the far side of the house. He didn’t recognize any of the boxes, they were all stuffed full, some of them looked like they were on the verge of bursting, hemorrhaging their contents, but would only have been suppressed by more boxes, windows, and roof.

The walkway to the door on the distant side of the house, which was very inconveniently placed given the driveways place in relation, was packed gravel and dirt, the same yellowish rock that the rest of the driveway consisted of, only slightly smaller and a little more sporadic. The house was renovated several times, I guessed that the kitchen in the back of the house had probably been much smaller, and at the front of the house in decades gone by. Sometimes the more you change something, the less it makes sense.

Reaching the door, he pulled the screen door open with a hard tug. It had that annoying, yet all too common tendency of sticking, as well as an equally annoying creak. If you were to pull slowly the sound was a low grating noise, like nails on a big chalk board, pulling quickly produced a sound a few octaves higher that was more of a stabbing pain on your ears. Behind this was a heavy wood door, and while clearly a more recent addition, the paint on it was peeling, in some places in huge sheets.

Upon entering through said door you find yourself immediately in the living room, through this door there wasn’t anything of a foyer, it just opened to the middle of the room. The inside of the door was painted a light eggshell color matching the living room walls, as if the prior owners were trying to hide the existence of the door altogether. Like it were meant as a secret door.

Taking a left inside the door would lead you past the stairs to the cellar, through a small hallway and into the enormous kitchen. Being an addition to the house, the ceiling was much higher than the rest of the first floor, exposed cross beams sprouting from the old part of the house, and shooting at a light 35° angle down to the new exposed wall. They started at about 10 feet or more and tapered to a moderate 7 feet just above the little window over the sink looking into the back yard. This was where he found her.

Walking into the kitchen, the first thing he noticed was the ladder next to him against the old wall, leaning against the trimmed frame of the doorway. Turning a little further, one more step in, he saw her hanging there. He stood and watched her sway for hours, maybe days. She was beautiful, serene, and almost angelic hanging there, her face a surreal shade of soft purplish blue.

As time passed he had the chance to rebuild the whole scene over and over again in his mind. As far as he could tell, she rigged the noose at the table at the far end of the room. The chair she sat at was still pulled out a little. The rope she hadn’t used was sitting in a neat coiled pile, from the bottom protruded one end reaching off the edge of the table toward the floor, the edges frayed. The old kitchen knife she used to cut it was lying inside the coils, the handle rested at the top of the stack.

She’d left a note, but it never answered any of his questions. It was written in purple ink, a few spots from the tears she shed as she was writing caused it bloom into blurry purple flowers throughout the page. The pen she used was in her front skirt pocket, cap up, like she always did, he used to tell her that the pen would skip if she did that, and she always said she’d rather it skip, than have it ruin her shirt when it exploded. This is a pointless memory, but one that could never fade.

When she'd finished making the noose, she must have climbed to the top of the ladder and tied a slipknot around a beam and just threw it toward the middle of the room, as far as it would reach with the other end around her neck. She had to have jumped hard, sliding the ladder aside where he'd found it, and then just swung there. He often wondered if she spun around, getting one last look of the room, and the world outside the windows, the table, the room, the world outside the windows, round and round like that.

On the note it said that she couldn’t stand the look in ‘their’ eyes, it said that she couldn’t stand to ruin anyone else’s life. At the bottom of the page still attached to the plain spiral notebook it said, “Always and Forever, I love you…” Every letter she’d ever written him featured this moniker, which brought a tear to his eye. He always wished that the note was too him specifically, he always wish he would have kept it, held it close to his heart, never let her go, as if her soul was still lingering there on the page.

With every breeze the old yellow curtains on the window to the east let in a stream of light illuminating the dust swirling in the air. The kid took one last look around, walked away, and never looked back, which is much harder than it sounds. And it sounds pretty damn hard, but one thing was for certain, he was not going to break a promise he'd made her.

Marring the pristine cleanness of the blank page, I’m always afraid, constantly worrying that whatever I write down, whatever ink I coat the paper with will not do it justice. I wonder if the strokes I make with my pen will be in vain, a waste of time, a waste of energy, of effort, or ink, or the page.

Maybe it is strange that I feel compelled to show respect to the paper I write on, I think a lot of artists worry about their mediums since it is so crucial to the communication of their device. But I am not an artist, so why would I care, how does it matter? How does any of it matter?

It was raining, hard, coming down in sheets as the wind drove it into the siding of the house. The thunder and the lightning added their own unique ingredients to the frenzied concoction. It was a summer storm in the dark of night, it was so dark that without the lightening you couldn’t see the torrent pummeling the earth, but with each flash you could see the millions of drops hanging in the air, if for just an instant.

Lying alone, listening to the storm and the music, something from the band Longfellow, on the floor of my room between the bed and the T.V. on mute, reporters silently delivering the sad messages and telling the masses what to do. With a blank piece of paper and a pen in my hand, I tried desperately, not to find inspiration, but to put it into words. The system fan of my computer vibrated the floor against my elbows. This was how to escape from the world without setting foot outside your home, happily drifting away until the jarring knock at the front door sucked me back into reality, painfully.

It was Friday, six hours at school six hours at work and now less than half an hour at home, the storm was moving in on the drive home, it chased me all the way to the house, the first drops spattering the pavement as the door closed behind me. You could smell the damp concrete; it was that almost sweet smell you get as the water begins to permeate the pores of the asphalt and cement.

There is a signature to the knock of a cop, it’s very forceful, no matter what you are doing, even waiting for a cop to come, it will catch you off guard. It makes you wonder if they have some type of highly specialized training for knocking. I always imagine a young cadet sitting in a tiny little desk, one of those things that don’t quite have enough of a plane to write on, and no matter how you sit, it isn’t comfortable. The man at the front of the room, a respected officer with years of field experience, explaining to the young faces the importance that the knock is in the rapport building, how it allows you to gain control of the situation before you’ve ever met face to face. At least, I'm sure it would be something like that.

It was the sound of foot steps down the hard wood floor of the hallway; it was the scraping sound of the steel bolt of the lock sliding open. It was the sound of voices exchanging pleasantry, mother and detectives. It was obscured muffled sounds of talking, of questions, and answers, shuffling feet.

This kid was smart; believe it or not, and more often people would believe not, which suited him just fine. He had this terrible ability to grasp things very quickly, learning fast. Understanding the preceding, it must also be explained that he was, in every way, socially inept, not completely devoid of the capability of social interaction, but inept none-the-less. It wasn’t that it was difficult for him to make friends; it was only difficult to keep them. People, most people, were not as smart, and if they were they would choose not to show it, sinking to the lowest common denominator, all part of the same compost heap. This kid was the walking definition for the antonym of tactful. He was a walking, talking, living, breathing correction machine, pointing out anything that seemed to be a failing, something that was said incorrectly, a fact that was misstated, or, on many occasions, just explaining something that probably didn't need to be explained. The thing about people, people hate to be wrong.

He was a smart-a-holic, desperately seeking the twelve step program, the thing that would save him. Save him from the bitter ending, a life of loneliness, locked in his own brilliant mind for none to see. He didn’t want to be at a desk, in a dark room, writing the story of his life, blank pages. It wasn’t his personality, it was him. He was everything that everyone hated, and only wanted to fix it.

When he found someone that could tolerate him, he would latch on as tight as he could, bring himself into their life, in the hopes they would be willing to enter his. Most of the time he would just overstep his boundaries; he would alienate the only people that would show him any love, affection, the beautiful people in his life.

The girl was beautiful; she was a wonderful and unique creature. She was also brilliant, struggling with the gripping and debilitating effects of smart-a-holicism herself. They got along so perfectly, she was completely capable of dealing with him, of tolerating the things he said and did, and he was so very grateful for it.

He used to wonder about the concept of life and marriage, how people are taught, en masse, that we get to find someone marry them, make children and live forever until the end. It left him so many questions about that one person, if there is one person, what happens if you choose incorrectly? What happens if, in the couple, both of you pick wrong, or worse, what if only one of you is wrong? What if you picked right, but she dies; what if she kills herself?

As a little boy of about 8 or 9 years old, I was stung by a bee; this event coincided with the discovery that I was violently allergic to bees. We lived near a river, a big river that ran the longitudinal span of the country. This was a typically violent river that my mother would never let me play near, telling me that I could get hurt, be swept away.

When I was stung, I happened to be climbing a branch in a tree that hung six or seven feet over the churning waters below. Within a few seconds, the grip I’d had on the branch let go as my body struggled needlessly, succumbing to the toxins and the stinger of the mighty bee. Why this creature felt compelled to sting me, I never knew, but with no grip, gravity took over and I plunged into the murky rushing waters below.

That spring had been a particularly wet one, it was an early thaw, and the winter had seen a great deal of snow, more than usual. All of this contributed to the river, which was so much higher than it normally was. It would have been impossible for me to overcome had I not been suffering the paralyzing effects of the allergic reaction, so of course, this was trouble.

I rolled helplessly, down the river, like a rag doll in a dog's mouth. It was cold, frigid cold, the kind of cold that makes gasp for breath when it touches you. It was the kind of cold that hurt, and the hurt spread quickly from the outside, in. Of course, this day I was lucky, very lucky.

Luck is a tricky for me, I’m one of the luckiest people you’ll ever meet, but every stitch of it is bad. However, today, a man was fishing on the banks, and spotted me. Somehow he was able to pull me out and onto the muddy shore, and continuing the good grace that had uncharacteristically befallen me, this man, with a slight stumble from the mild intoxication of inexpensive domestic beer, recognized my affliction, and it just so happened, he was also allergic to something. He carried with him an EpiPen, which he quickly administered to me.

If you aren’t familiar, an EpiPen is a device that administers epinephrine, a chemical which stimulates the alpha and beta receptors, typically used to treat severe allergic reactions, as well as other severe conditions that affect breathing. Although I didn’t know what it was, or how it worked, I was relieved that I could breathe again. I lied in the mud for what must have been days. Have you ever noticed that time isn’t really constant?

Finally snapping out of the daze to the sound of the soaking wet man shouting at me, I told him I was alright, I told him that he saved my life. He seemed interested in giving me the third degree; he wanted to know if I was alright, how long I was in the water, he wanted to know if I needed to go to the hospital.

Dave, as he identified himself, was probably in his late twenties, or maybe his early thirties. He was a reasonably handsome guy, if not for his present 'drowned rat look'. He was wearing name brand blue jeans, and a black t-shirt sporting the logo of some beer company, who can remember which? The entire ensemble seemed out of character for the guy. With a short hair cut and clean shaven face, the really expensive looking watch and respectable demeanor, I had him pegged for a suit and tie Monday through Friday. The guy went fishing for the weekend, and managed to catch himself a kid. I only hoped he wouldn't throw me back.

He asked me again if I was ok, a little uneasily. This was the third time, and I wondered how many more times I would have to tell him that I was alright, I guessed that he didn’t have kids of his own, the paternal instinct didn’t seem to work for him. It also occurred to me that rescuing a kid from a raging river may have rattled him a bit, although I could have missed the mark on that bit.

Even though this man had just saved my life, I knew that as soon as I was home, that life would be forfeit. I wasn’t sure how far down the river I had gone but I knew that it was likely farther than what I wanted to walk, wet and cold, to my certain doom. My loving mother would kill me on sight, because she cared.

He was kind enough to invite me into his home. He let me take a warm shower to rinse the mud off of my clothes, and let me dry off by the gas fireplace. Even with the sun over head, it was a cold day, especially standing in soaking wet clothes from being in a river filled with the rushing waters of the snow melt from up north. I imagined penguins.

It was a short walk from the edge of the river through his back yard and into the 2 story brick house. We went in through the back patio of his walk out basement, he had a big screen TV and an even bigger stereo set up, the furniture was old and worn, but looked really comfortable. We went up the stairs to the main level, which was in stark contrast to the basement, the furniture was all brand new, and every room looked like a snap shot from a furniture catalogue. Black leather and brushed steel, black and white photography of random buildings and trees.

The house was enormous, a lot bigger than I expected, looking around there was absolutely no evidence of a wife or children. There wasn’t a single photo or portrait of anyone you'd think was family, there were no toys, no clutter, everything looked like it was pretty much unlived. Although it didn’t have the appearance, you could tell more or less that it was in reality a really big bachelor pad. He opened the fridge to offer me a drink, I saw that it was filled with beer, coke, and condiments, and no less than three pizza boxes.

As it turned out I had only gone about two miles downstream, into the next city. It wasn’t a long drive back, and thankfully he offered to take me. I don’t remember where, but I had heard that when someone saves your life, they feel responsible for you, the way a parent does. Dave still sends me cards at every holiday, usually featuring scantily clad women and humorous sexual entandré.

In Dave’s driveway sat the biggest contradiction I could have imagined. In front of this beautiful house, his nice furniture and well kept lawn, on a street with brand new cars and boats, was an old red rusty Dodge pickup, which I surmised had to be at least as old as he was. Inside, the seats were cracked black vinyl, behind the cracks peeked a dirty yellow color of foam rubber, the dashboard suffered the same affliction. A problem with the muffler made the ride quiet, only for the inability to make conversation. The droning roar of the big V8 engine would stay with you for hours.

Thankfully, the drive was short, and we pulled up into my driveway a few minutes later. I had asked him to let me out, hoping that I would be able to sneak into the house, and get away with my crimes unscathed, unfortunately it was too late.

We had been spotted, and my mom rushed out of the house as soon as she saw me getting out of the strange man’s car.

“What did he do now?” she asked, an exasperated tone in her voice, as if I were some kind of miscreant.

He asked me if this was my mother, when I affirmed this he mouth the word ‘wow’, I don’t think he knew that I saw him. Something to understand about my mother and it sounds strange for a son to say without sounding Oedipal, but she was a knockout for a woman of her years, which at that time, would have been a woman of his years.

“Nothing, ma’am.” Ma’am?

“Nothing mom, it’s no big deal,” with this I tried to push past her, but found myself snared. She asked Dave what had happened, with a knowing tone of voice. I expected the tale to spill out, the signature on my death warrant.

A tale spilled out, but did not include a river, or a bee sting. He told her about his new sprinkler system that just wasn’t working right. He had called the company, but they weren’t going to have anyone out to service it until later in the week, and of course, she knew how long those things can take. He explained that he didn’t know how to turn off the timer system, and it turned out that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Obviously he felt bad about letting me walk home soaking wet, so he offered me a towel, and a ride home. I guessed now that he must have been a salesman. A good salesman who now felt responsible for me.

She thanked him, told me to thank him, and he left. I expected the questions to start flooding out as we walked into the house. Where were you, what were you doing, why were you doing it? I knew that she knew, somehow she always knew, but for some reason she just let it go. Have you ever perpetuated a lie by not offering the truth?

She never brought it up. I used the experience to keep away from the river from that point on. I didn’t think about it again until years later at a family reunion. Standing amongst aunts and uncles, grandparents and other people I didn’t really know but somehow knew me, in the middle of a big park one of my cousins was swinging wildly at a bee buzzing around his head. My mother gave me one of these looks and with that knowing tone in her voice she said to stop, and that I knew that I was allergic to bees. It was one of the scariest things I had ever heard her say in my life.

From down the hall I could hear her talking to the detectives, and I could hear that tone again. Even though I couldn’t make out what was being said, I could tell that she knew. She always knew.

Have you ever seen those television shows where the police chase someone, wanting to pull them over for a seemingly minor offence, a broken tail light or a rolling stop? At the end of the chase, or at some point after they've been caught, the question is always posed, ‘why did you run?’ In almost every case, the person in cuffs will say the same thing, even if they were model citizens, who had never been in any trouble before, they will state that they were scared. Why do we live in a world where people feel they need to run away from everything?

I had gotten up, and opened the door just a crack and listened down the hall. I could hear my mother. She never lied, not once, she may have embellished some, and left out anything that she didn’t think could be used against her later, but every question had a truthful answer. She was covering for me; I wondered why she would do that.

In all honesty, I had disconnected from her years ago, even before everything that happened with Caitlin, and what had gone on since, I honestly don’t think that I had exchanged more than a few words with her. We existed with only the most rudimentary relationship functions, in the same house, but not the same place. I didn't think much about it then, but now, I really don't understand it. I guess it's the sort of thing that happens all the time.

Although it seemed to last forever, their conversation was actually very short. I waited for the sound of footsteps toward the door of my room, but they never came. I waited to hear someone call my name, but never was the conversational tone broken. After a final exchange, the door opened, far enough to bump the key rack and jingle the keys, and then it shut again with a dull thud. Footsteps in the driveway, two car doors opened and close, an engine started, and pulled away, then fade to silence.

As far as I could tell my mom was still standing in front of the door, after a while I finally heard her come toward my room. Then there was a soft knock, followed by my door opening, an action that says I respect your privacy enough to knock, but since I created you I can walk in as I see fit.

She looked at me, her face blank, even the normally rosy blush of her cheeks was gone. After several weeks of uncomfortable silence she finally broke down and told me what they had told her. They were two detectives, they were following up on the suicide of the girl some time back, and were investigating all the connections they could to make sure that there wasn’t any ‘foul play’ involved. As she said this, she made the over emphasized hand gesture of the quotations, which gave me the impression that the detective had done the same thing to her, and she now felt compelled to pass it on to me.

The girl’s name, I am told, was Samantha Waaltrip. Hearing this, I began jumping for joy on the inside, I could now say, without lying, that I didn’t know any Samantha, Waaltrip or otherwise. I could tell she quickly recognized the deceit, and surmised that I would not be offering anything new to the conversation. As she walked out, I told her thank you, and I told her I love you. She said she loved me too.

The next day I was gone. After the sound of my engine roaring to life, everything seemed to fade away. A blur of landscape changing from the rich greens of trees to the deep yellows of budding farm fields and finally the harsh browns of sandy desert until I was standing at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere, Nevada. I was sure that I had been on the road for at least two days, maybe three, I know I'd slept; somewhere, sometime, a rest stop, a Wal-mart parking lot, anyplace I could get away with it, my body would force the issue, then I'd wake and move on. I can't say for certain that I'd eaten more than a few gas station snacks, but I hadn't had any appetite at all anyway.

The middle of nowhere, Nevada was the name I'd dubbed this particular rest stop in the desert. It was simply a small turn off with a roughly built building, which had three doors. On the left side was the entrance to a filthy men’s room, and on the right was the entrance to the women's room, which I had no doubt would also be filthy. The door in the middle had no handle, and was painted the same brown color that almost every rest stop sports and it shined and bubbled with pits and indentations, which were the result of painting over the same thing continually over many years. Behind that door, I surmised, was the plumbing and electrical closet, and, though it didn't show it, probably some cleaning materials and supplies.

I laid down on the hood of my truck, a predecessor to the SUV, but this would never be the soccer moms preferred mode of pretentious travel. This was a 1978 GMC Jimmy, sitting on nearly 40” of vulcanized rubber tire, the body a primer grey, suffering from only the slightest rust on the undercarriage. The guy who had owned it previously had been desperately trying to restore and build it into an off-road machine of mass destruction, his words. One day his wife told him they were about to have another mouth to feed, and the extra money from the overtime he was putting in at the factory was about to go somewhere else, he decided to re-align his priorities rather than the camber of the wheels.

I’d gotten it for a steal, but now almost a year later, with rising oil costs; I knew that this was not your regular commuter. It could get 10 miles to the gallon on the highway, if I were to drive the way my grandmother would drive, if she'd ever got her driver's license. I was hurting for it, financially. I did, however, make it almost 3,000 miles only stopping for gas 6 times, at least, 6 times that I could remember. Mathematically, it didn't make sense, being a 35 gallon tank. I knew that my supply of cash would not hold out much longer. Now, I thought that maybe it was time to rethink things, though to rethink them, you would have needed to have thought them through in the first place. As I stared up into a nearly cloudless sky, a firmament of the deepest violet. This struck me as odd, because without a moon, or clouds, the sky should have been pitch black, or filled with stars. There wasn't another city for 40 miles, and I'd left the last at least 40 miles earlier. However, while pondering all of this, I was still able to come to the conclusion that I needed to make a phone call.

Turning on my cell phone for the first time in days, I was less than surprised to find that I had no service. It wasn’t hard to believe that here, in the middle of nowhere, Nevada, looking at desert and highway for miles in every direction, I wasn’t even getting a signal from some another carriers tower. I thought back to the day I got the phone, when the guy behind the counter started telling me about their great nationwide plan, which came with no roaming charges, and provided perfect service practically everywhere in the country, and even quite a few places out of it. I remember telling the guy that I was not planning on leaving the state and that if I did, I would just call and upgrade my plan at that time. Why pay for nationwide if I wasn’t going to be nationwide? How wrong I was, though I wouldn't want service now anyway.

Right now, service meant connection, and connection meant tracking. A cell phone catches a network, and it's lit up like a Christmas tree. Anyone who might be looking would be able to find me without trying, and if someone was looking for me, I wanted them to have to try. This was the same reason I wasn’t using my debit cards, credit card, or any large chain stores that might have some kind of national based surveillance system. No, I turned my cell phone on because I wanted the time and a phone number. Without service, the phone merely gave the time as a guess based on the last time it had spoken with the network. The phone number, on the other hand, was right there.

The pay phone was dusty, caked with a thick brown and orange coat of desert. I couldn’t tell which company it belonged too, but it didn’t really matter. Humming the jingle of a commercial I remembered clearly, I dialed the 800 number that I'd seen at the bottom of the screen. On the other end came a series of chimes, and an oddly sensual voice welcomed me to the service, and then asked me to enter the number I wished to call. I obliged, and after a few clicks she asked me to say my name, to which I asked her 'fuck off'. She kindly thanked me, and asked me to hold while my party was connected. After another series of clicks and beeps, I heard a voice at the other end, already halfway through a barrage of questions.

It’s fourth grade and the school bus bounces down the road toward the next stop, sitting in the back I watch the houses go by, stately multi level homes with big yards two car garages. I could walk, giving me an extra 15 minutes of sleep, but because I would have to cross a busy road, packed with morning traffic worrying about what they needed to get done before the boss came in and not whether some kid was crossing in front of them, the school board felt that this was the answer to keep me safe. More aptly, this was what they did to keep themselves safe from lawsuits. Should someone get hit on their way to school, not only would it result in huge costs of settlements, but the negative publicity and outcry of parents, more upset that their tax money is now in the pocket of another parent, not that their kids might not be safe. It was easier for them to stop a problem before it started which an oddly proactive action on the part of a group of politicians who were likely copying policy from another district that had been less fortunate.

I am sure you can remember, or at least imagine a bus ride in the fourth grade, not really old enough to do anything on your own, such as drive a car, but not near young enough to be accepting of that fact. It was on this bus, halfway through that school year, that I'd met Everett. Everett and I had a lot in common, we like the same music, the same comics, the same video games. Although, his house was much cooler than mine, we suffered similar negative effects from a lack of a full time father figure. He was the first bosom buddy I'd had since I had moved to the state. Prior to this city, I'd been switched from school to school as my mother desperately tried to keep a roof over our heads. That was the fourth place we'd called home.

Years later, standing between the men’s and woman’s restrooms, right next to a badly painted brown door, he's explaining to me that it was after 2 a.m., that it was a school day, that my mom had been calling him, and that the cops had actually pulled him out of his PSEO class, which is a pre-college college course, and were asking him all of these questions about some Samantha girl who had killed herself. When he finally paused to take a breath I told him that I was in trouble, and that I needed his help. He finally stopped talking, and started listening.

At 2:15 in the morning, Everett may not be the most receptive to me. But if I knew anything, it was that he was my best bro, and even if I had done some shitty things to him in the past, like leaving him at a punk rock show stranded with no ride, he would pull through for me. That’s just the way we were.

The receiver safely hanging back in its cradle, I turned and started the trek across the little parking lot to my truck, parked ingeniously across three spots, doors hanging open, music blasting. As I walked, the sand under my Etnies crunching into the asphalt a door opened behind me. Apparently, someone was exiting the ladies room.

This is how I met Martin. A mundane looking guy in his late twenties or early thirties, but this was a guess. He was of medium height, the messy brown mat on top his head was shaggy, but not entirely out of control and made him look a few inches taller. He wore a navy blue jumpsuit, like the ones you see maintenance guys wear when they are doing something particularly messy, or an auto mechanic who spends his days under cars of varying age and decay, although his seemed to be much cleaner.

Standing at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere, Nevada, at 12 am in the morning, along a lonely and quiet highway, you get the sense of being small, especially when you aren’t exactly sure where you are. When you feel small, and alone, you begin to yearn for some company, something to break the verbal silence, to break the monotony. You want a companion to make the whole experience more bearable.

As Martin zigzagged through the parking lot, mumbling something about needing to be on the bus, to stay on the bus, his eyes glazed over looking lost, this feeling came rushing to me and I realized how alone I was. Watching the guy walk randomly toward the desert, it became easier and easier to see that there was defiantly something off about him.

I’m not sure if Martin’s name was Martin. When I finally got him calmed down enough to talk to me, he just stared at me. When I asked him his name, he told me he couldn’t talk to strangers. There didn’t seem to be any reasoning with the guy, but when I saw the nametag sewn onto the overalls that said Martin, it was the name I stuck with.

I tried to talk to him for the better part of an hour; I realized he was ‘special’ in more ways than one. He was extremely polite, but didn’t seem to be able to talk in the first person, words like I or me were not operators he could used referring to himself.

“He got off the bus to go to the bathroom, when he came out, the bus was getting smaller. It was in the road,” he had this stutter, it took him a while to get some of the words out, he fought with them like he was fighting a crocodile, “He can’t go in the road, so he went back in the bathroom, but when he came out the bus so small he couldn’t see it anymore.”

I could only guess at how long this poor guy was coming in and out of the bathroom looking for his bus. I knew someone just like him in school; he was in an art class with me. Great guy, but he was autistic. Before he came into the class, the special education teacher had a short chat with us, trying to teach us about his condition, and what it meant. She told us that autism is a complex developmental disability. It normally appears in children in the first three years of their lives. The result of a neurological disorder that affects the functioning of the brain, it impacts normal development of the brain in areas of social interaction and communication skills. It’s part of a group of disorders that all, at least to me, seemed very similar.

From what I could remember, Autism can easily appear as part of several mental and developmental disorders in one person. As a caveat, I am not a doctor, nor am I well versed in these things, but I guessed that more than likely this man was Autistic. What I wasn't guessing at was that he was alone, and probably needed some help.

In my experience, interaction wasn’t the problem when working with someone with autism. The problem was learning to interact with them, because they couldn't learn to interact differently with you. What I was quickly learning from Martin was that I didn’t really know how to ask questions he could answer. I asked several times if I could give him a ride, but was told only that he was supposed to be on the bus.

It made sense that someone would come looking for him, but I was just a little concerned. Not knowing how long he had been there, when he might have eaten last, and at the same time there was only so long I could wait there with him. I now knew where I was going and wanted to get there sooner rather than later. I spent about an hour trying to get Martin to come with me. Finally giving up, I got back in the Jimmy, and prepared to hit the road again. To my surprise, Martin hopped into the seat next to me and buckled his seat belt, and just sort of sat there like it was where he belonged. With that, I hit the road.

Have you ever shoplifted? As a kid, he would shoplift constantly, seeing it as a victim-less crime. Eventually, he saw it as giving back to the store for all the insurance they were spending so much money on. He didn't need any of the things he took. He had a loving parent that provided him with all of his earthly needs and did her best to provide him with many of his earthly wants.

Truly, it was the rush. Something about the act of doing it, something about committing a crime and getting away with it, was exciting. From the time I was in junior high, my friends and I would take almost anything we could get our hands on. We had a shop lifting list, things that we wanted to take, and on it were things like comic books, toys, cards, video games, movies, knives, pellet guns, tools for building our fort. It didn’t really matter, though, what we stole, as long as we were stealing.

Now, so many years later, with cash in pocket, he found himself stealing again. Shoplifting works best when you do it for sport, not need. When you have the cash and aren’t using it, you don’t stand out, and eyes don’t fall on you as easily. I had the money to pay for the gas I'd just pumped, and for everything I was sticking in the sleeves of my coat.

Worst case scenario, the clerk behind the counter, more interested in keeping her quiet night quiet, and going home to her shitty apartment or trailer would either just ‘not’ notice me, or let me pay for my goods and allow life to go on.

This is where Everett was supposed to meet me, not this particular Shell station, but here in Truckee near Zephyr Cove, Nevada on the shores of the great Lake Tahoe. Everett was the perfect guy to come help me for a few reasons. First of all his parents don’t care where he is or what he’s doing, or who he’s doing it with. Something about trust, I think. Secondly, he was a good friend, no matter how deep in it I was, he would dive head first after me. Third, he wasn’t diving to rescue me; he was just coming to keep me company.

So, I’m standing in the middle of a cramped Shell station, stuffing snack stuffs in my pockets, Martin is hanging out in the back seat of my truck, I found a place to crash for the next couple nights, where Ev is supposed to meet me. Instead, with the jingle of the bells, and the sudden waking of the clerk, my good friend walks through the door.

“Hey, you know you have a crazy guy in your truck,” thrusting a thumb over his shoulder, indicating Martin who was now pressing his face against the window in my back seat. That's how Everett is, a penchant for stating the obvious.

We left the store together; I was slightly heavier than I was when I went in, my pockets were lined with various products of convenience, snacks, candy, a couple bottles of coke, and one of those tiny bottles of aspirin. This was dinner, for three. I'd paid for my fuel, and started for the door while Everett bought a campfire kit. When the bells jingled behind us, my heart raced, the high was a big part of the experience. An experiment in human nature.

Meeting Martin for the first time could be very off putting, especially if you had no idea what was wrong with him. Not that you could say anything was really wrong with him at all. I'd had several days of experience with Martin, so it was normal for me when he sat and hugged himself, bobbing back in forth in front of the fire mumbling about some book.

Lake Tahoe is a massive body of water, and a very beautiful place. Camp grounds far from the lake were not only cheap, but all but abandoned, especially outside of tourist season. It was nice enough, they had a shower and bathroom, small fire pits, and a place to park my truck, and at $15 a night, it was easy on the cash supply, which was continuing to dwindle.

The old woman behind the desk, when I'd registered, was attractive for a woman in her mid-forties, if you were attracted to stereotypical trailer trash that is. She had dirty blonde hair, which isn't to say that her hair was dirty blonde in color so much as it was blonde and was in desperate need of a washing. She had asked questions in a rasping voice, mostly about how long I was staying and why I was there. I was pretty sure this was less small talk and more making certain that I wasn’t planning on moving in. She reeked of menthol cigarettes and cheap whisky, and cheap sex, and looked as though she had lived through enough seasons there to know that some punk kid with an empty truck on the off season was probably less than reputable. In the end though, she handed me a small map that showed each of the spots and used a cheap Bic pen to mark off my plot. It was lucky number 13.

We sat around the fire roasting stolen marshmallows and making s’mores with stolen graham crackers and stolen chocolate bars, I began to fill Everett in on everything that had happened since the night I left him stranded after that show. He was obviously aware of some of what had been happening, but I just filled in all the gaps, and there were a lot of gaps to fill, since he and I had a much different relationship after Caitlin, or Stephanie, or whatever her name was.

Three o’clock in the morning and the downtown metropolis was silent like a ghost town. The bars had long since closed, and even the last of the staggering drunks had either fallen into cabs or been picked up and were sleeping it off. You’d almost expect to see tumble weed roll across the street, caught up in a rushing breeze.

During the day, and most of the night, you would see people no matter where you looked. At some points during the day you would literally look out over a sea of bodies, the persistent drone of people talking to each other, talking to their phones, or talking to themselves. Now, with the exception of the humming of street lamps up above and the very occasional car passing by, it was quiet. Eerily quiet.

Looking up above you, skyscrapers loomed over head, lit beautifully until your eyes reach the apex of the street lamps, then their dark outline reach ever higher until they blend into the black of the sky. They were ominous, and foreboding. Especially this night the dark sky was so black that the skyline was nearly indiscernible from the place where at least a few stars should have peeked through the veil of clouds.

Caitlin and I walk alone, dressed mostly in black trying not to draw attention to ourselves. This is a lot harder than we would have thought, being the only people anywhere, it's hard not to feel like you stick out, no matter what you're wearing. We were on a mission. It had been decided that we needed to do something new, something bigger and bolder. This meant that she had decided we needed to do something new, something bigger and bolder.

For the last few weeks we had been working on our movies or films as she called them. This meant that we took a video camera we'd stolen, wrote some crazy stories, and then acted them out. For the most part it became our excuse to fuck on camera, and then afterward, still out of breath, she would freak out and erase the tape. I'd always considered this to be 'Girl' stuff. Apparently, now, she was bored with that.

She asked me, “What are the first 5 things that come to mind when you think of evil?” Our target was number four on my list, the big corporate coffee shop. There were two more items on my list we could target, and two that were more or less out of reach.

Years later I would meet a man named Kelly. A man of some years, with incredibly pale blue eyes and a spirit unlike any other, you could only tell his age by ignoring everything about who he was, and looking at him physically. Even then, you'd have to work hard to guess how old he truly was. He worked for a company that could have easily made it onto the list of evils. He was one of nearly 250,000 employees across the country, clearly over qualified, and repeatedly offered promotions, which he would decline, stating simply, "I'm happy right where I am."

I would have loved to be in one of those meetings, as they offered him yet another promotion, just to hear him say why he was happy staying at the bottom of the pay scale. He never told anyone why he did what he did, why it was he had no interest in moving up in the world. Most people assumed that his age was the main factor, because he hadn't started there until after he'd 'retired' and was literally just doing the job so that he'd have something to occupy his time. Here was a man who, seemingly, accepted his job as a peon for a career. He wasn’t there for the pay, he wasn’t there for a challenge; he was merely there.

His position within the vast organization did not afford him and special access. He didn't get a set of keys to get him into locked rooms; he didn't have special passwords that would unlock special folders. All he had was his desk and a limited network account that hardly allowed him to do his job. His general good nature, however, did net him a lot of friends. He was charismatic and genuine, and people just seemed to want to know him. A lot of these friends did have special access, keys, security clearances, and trust.

After 3 ½ years of going to work Monday through Friday, working his pathetic job for sub-pathetic pay, with minor increases every six months, his previously unseen plan went into motion. He sent an email and made some phone calls, and within a few hours, his will of spirit, his years of planning came to fruition. When he said go, no one person had any idea what he was doing. Then he was gone, never to be seen again. He managed to cripple a multi-billion dollar, multi-national company, and he never once lifted a finger. The plan was simple, but it took the company many years to rebuild everything. He did a service to the world, as far as I'm concerned.

This night, standing in the back alley behind a Starbucks not more than 3 blocks from where I’d first met her; we found the plain grey steel door. In the silence of the night the clicking of the lock-pick kit in the dead bolt echoed repeatedly back and forth. It was the rush of adrenaline, it was the high, and it was the excitement. Then we were in.

To use a technical term, we had ‘cased’ the joint for several days. Initially, we'd thought that this was going to be extremely difficult. Instead, it turned out that it was almost easier than shoplifting. The franchisee didn't have a security system. We guessed that they didn't feel they needed one, for who in their right mind would rob a store for coffee. In all honesty, I can imagine a lot of people in their right mind doing it, but it was the only answer that seemed remotely plausible. All we had to do was get into the do, and thanks to the great Internet, that was not a problem at all.

The hardest part of the entire endeavor was answering a fundamental question; what could we do to the place that would mean something? Certainly, we could trash the place, tear it apart and leave it in ruin, but likely the insurance company would pay out, and in the end, they would get brand new equipment and stock. That didn't seem like much of an insult, and certainly carried no definable message.

Finally, we had thought it through from start to finish. This basically meant that we had no idea. However, standing in the back room, amongst the bags of coffee beans and racks of flavorings, syrups, and whatever else they had boxed up to give their product that fresh brewed flavor, we were both very excited. What we did next was no surprise, really, as we tore each other’s clothes off and proceeded to defile nearly every square inch of the shop, from the stock room to the counter to those squishy arm chairs by a fake gas fire.

After the fourth time, lying there on the counter top, chests heaving, bodies aching, blood pumping, she suddenly had an epiphany. A moment of clarity, and her eyes began to sparkle, that look of sudden and utter exhilaration.

“What does a place like this do if they don’t have cups?” She asked this question, and the look of sheer cleverness on her face was enough to take me in. This sounds so weak thinking back on it, but at the time, it seemed a brilliant plan. This was the beginning of our new life in guerrilla terrorism against corporate coffee bars. We would later go beyond this, we would remove crucial components to cappuccino machines, and once we loaded my truck with about 300 lbs of coffee, leaving behind us only one can of Folgers we'd bought at Wal-Mart. Why vandalize, when we could cripple their operation, even if only for a short time.

“You guys stole all the cups?” Everett’s face was wide with astonishment. This was the reaction I expected, and it was hard not to drink it in. After all, that was the goal of the whole thing, an experiment in human nature.

This is the first time that I had told anyone anything that had happened. I talked for the better part of the night; I told him everything that had happened over the last year. I told him how I found her. He asked questions, some I had answers too, most I didn’t but had been expecting since I'd been asking them myself.

The sky was clear, and beautiful, at 4,500 feet above sea level; we were above the omnipresent layer of smog that hung over the many cities below. There were stars. More stars than I'd even thought existed. It wasn’t just that you could see the stars, either, they were brighter, more vivid, twinkling, and seemed so close that you could just reach up and pluck one down. The only thing that obscured them from our sight was our own breath that wisped through the air and before dissipating into nothingness.

“So now what?” He sat on a log, shifting back and forth, trying to get comfortable. We’d been talking for at least four hours, rather I had been talking, and he’d been trying to fit it all inside his head. Martin, long since curled up in the back of the Jimmy, was happily snoring, a soft, even, almost methodical sound that you could set a watch to.

“I don’t know man,” I stood up, looking around at all the tall pines, I turned away from Ev started walking, “let's walk for a bit."

Everett and I walked along the side of the small road, just off the asphalt on dirt and gravel of the shoulder, between the road and the tall trees and very occasional house. We walked slowly, in silence, the sound of our shoes crunching softly through accumulated pine needles, leaves and pebbles. Neither of us really had anything to say. Ev had posed the question so innocently, but neither of us had any idea what to do next; walking seemed the best way to avoid it.

After a while, Everett set the pace; his head cocked back looking at the sky. The giant unipocket on the front of his skate logo endowed hoody was stuffed with his hands. I imagined that he was trying to figure out if this was really something that he wanted to get into, wrestling with the fact that he had already come this far, and that turning back would mean abandoning me in my time of need. While all this was happening, I started to sniff the air, a few moments later, woken from his revelry, Ev seemed to smell it too, his head leveling off a bit as he gave the air a few tentative sniffs. There was an odd burning smell, not like the pleasant smell of a pine in a fireplace or a summer bonfire, but rather more like something electric, that melting rubber and plastic reek.

It was the smell of something awful. That sort of smell that won’t go away, even long after the smoke cleared, and you’ve washed and cleaned your clothes, long after you replaced whatever burned, and doused the stains in bleach and Lysol. It would linger still. As I contemplated this, it finally started to dawn on me that it was getting stronger the further we walked and I looked around to see where it was coming from, Everett doing the same.

“Dude-”

“Yeah, what the hell,” we kept walking, snapping our heads back and forth looking for the source of the foul smell.

It was a small trailer park; each cheap building closely huddled together like a refugee family on a boat turned back by the coast guard, the vision of freedom slowly disappearing behind them. They were set into a thick grove of trees so oppressive that the smoke billowing from a double wide in the middle, caught in the deep orange grasp of raging flames, was held within them like a chimney. The trees up here reach higher than you'd expect, so that when you look up from amongst them, all you can see is the sky directly above.

It’s captivating, watching a tragedy in action; you can’t take your eyes off of it. As the plastic and vinyl siding on the blue abomination peeled and fell to the ground, the thin insulation, most likely meant to be flame retardant, bursting into showers of sparks, and then smoldering and melting all over what would be a front lawn, a thin strip of dirt used to park a rusting grey Dodge Spirit. Then, the thin fiber board wall paneling, designed to look exactly like real wood, took up in an instant, like a piece of flash paper.

It surprised me to realize that no one else was watching this. As a matter of fact, it felt almost like we were the only ones who were there at all. You would think that someone would have woken up, run from the house, or that one of the other residents would have come out to see what was happening. As I thought about this, a neighboring mobile home began to catch; it was astonishing how quickly the entire home was swallowed up by the blaze.

More astonishing was how quickly each neighboring tenement, licked by the flames, began to take up as well. I could have stood there for hours watching each little building, a flaming testament to poorly constructed and inexpensive housing, burn down into smoky ash. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t live in a home that has an axle, but no matter how I look at it, they are not mansions on a hill.

Everett and I stood there, felt like only a few minutes, but it was probably more like an hour. We watched the smoldering buildings collapse in on themselves; carports becoming dumping grounds for the detaching rubble. The popping of the pine needles built up in piles on the roofs, the crackling of what little lumber was used, and the hissing of the steam as moisture is heated and evaporated. It was a plethora of sights and sounds.

“Shouldn’t there be fire trucks?” Everett said, not taking his eyes for a moment from the flames.

There were certainly enough neighboring houses, that someone should have, by now, called the fire department. There were no flashing lights, no sirens, there wasn’t a crowd of people all gathered around getting in the way, transfixed by the sight of carnage. It dawned on me at that point that something was wrong. It wasn’t that I was going to do something about it, but it seemed like someone should.

Gas L.P. tanks are a great and relatively inexpensive energy source for heating a home and cooking food. Often you will see people that use liquid propane will have a large horizontal cylindrical tank a good distance away from their homes. While L.P. tanks are resilient to heat and are designed to limit the chance of explosion, it’s still recommended to keep them away from anything that may spark fire. Sometimes, however, if a property is small enough, or completely overtaken with mobile homes, it may become impossible to give said tanks the distance they deserve. Typically this is against city or county zoning laws, and things like this are usually stopped before they ever start.

A BLEVE, or Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion (pronounced “BLEV-ee”) can happen if a fire heats and weakens the walls of a storage tank, especially the region above the stored liquid where cooling is less effective. When the weakened tank can no longer withstand the internal pressure, it fails, a blast of monumental proportions as I would describe it, where shrapnel is fired quickly, often overrun as the liquid bursts into a fireball rolling outward from the epicenter of the blast.

This was how Everett and I found out that there were people in some of these houses. I should say that this is how Everett and I found out there were people in these houses. To understand how we found this out, I should describe the way this particular park was laid out. Standing there on the street, looking into the long, narrow property, there were no less than 15 mobile homes, almost randomly scattered, with a very small narrow drive meandering in out amongst them.

Trees lined the entire campus, like a giant Ponderosa Pine fence, thick and intertwined with each other, towering over the little houses. At the very back, as you were facing, was a huge liquid propane gas take, the words Ferrellgas, Inc., Reno, Nev. stenciled on the outside, it was a dull white, there were several seams of rivets wrapping around it from the top down to belly. The tank was not all that near to the homes around it, but, there was a few small utility sheds between it and some of the burning homes, between those and the thick carpet of dried pine needles, there was more than enough combustibles to keep a fire going hot and long as it wended its way out.

I wouldn’t like to venture to guess how much propane was in that tank, but it looked to be about the general size and shape of a short semi trailer. It must have fed all the little houses, and it was near about the same size as each of them was. When it went, it went fast, and loud. The explosion knocked us on our asses, and left us at least 5 feet from where we had been standing. I caught a glimpse of roofs tearing off, and walls being propelled into each before I lost everything and was lying face up in the road.

It took a moment to regain composure; I looked up at the sky to see random debris falling. Pieces of siding, legs of chairs, counter tops, a microwave door, I watched them sail through the night. It was the dull wet slap very near my head that snapped me fully back into reality.

If it was the slap that snapped me full into reality, it was following spray I felt that got me to my feet. I had already seen a dead body, which made for many sleepless nights. Dreams of watching Caitlin hanging there, spinning, sometimes faster and faster until I woke up, other times, she would just open her eyes and I would scream in the night, she haunted me. Hers wasn't the only corpse I'd seen, either.

The last time I had been to Nevada, I was very young, and my Mother and I were driving down the mountainside after visiting some old friends of the family. The end of a long weekend trip, it was late at night, so there wasn’t a lot of traffic. She couldn’t take a lot of time off work, only having a small bit of vacation time, so we needed to start back to make time so that she'd be back for work on Wednesday morning.

Something about driving down a mountain at night, it’s strange, the road curves and bends back and forth, it doesn’t feel like the car is moving the way that it’s supposed to, like the road is moving the car for you. As you look out over the guard rail, it’s like looking into forever. The tops of trees are the only connection you have to the ground, and even that is a hard connection to make.

Rounding a curve, moving quickly past, we caught a glimpse of a car stuck in the guard rail, the front bumper of the car hanging slightly over the edge of the road. It disappeared quickly behind us, but at the next turn off just down the road we turned around so that we could make sure everyone was ok. We did this because we thought it was the right thing to do.

We pulled up behind the other car, turning on the flashers, and putting on the parking brake. She got out of the car, telling me to stay where I was; I got out too, and followed close on her heels. We could see someone in the driver’s seat, and she shouted, asking if he was alright. But there was no response. Things were getting tense. Somehow I just knew things weren't alright.

We finally reached the side of the car. The man was lying, slumped over the steering wheel. His window was rolled down, so she tapped him on the shoulder a few times, recoiling slightly at the feel of his shoulder. He definitely wasn’t alright. She took a deep breath, and reached into the car, one arm across his chest, she pulled him back against the seat.

When the car had hit, this man, who was a big guy and sitting too far forward, ended up lurching forward on impact. Even though he was wearing a seat belt, it didn’t matter. His rigid arms, tensed from the impending crash, broke the rubber coated plastic steering wheel, as he continued forward, and one end was driven into his chest. He must have died quickly. At least I told myself that, every time I envisioned it, which was often. This was the first time I had seen a dead body, but, as it turned out, it wouldn’t be the last.

“Oh, shit!” that was about as articulate as either of us could be at this point. There were body parts falling around us, like something out of a bad horror flick. Neither of us wondered why there were people in these houses, or why they just stayed there as they caught on fire. We weren’t worried about helping anyone. Right now, it seemed, was the time to leave.

Run.

It was there again, the pounding, my ears, my head, my neck, blood pumping through me. Breathing so heavily in the thin mountain air, coughing almost to the point where I expected to see blood, gasping to get catch the breath I’d lost.

Thoughts of loading everything back into the truck, and taking off at full speed ran around my head, but once I caught up with myself, once the breathing didn’t hurt, and the coughing stopped, once I could hear again, rather than the pumping rush of liquid through my body, it was a lot easier to see that there was no reason for it. We didn’t set the fire, we didn’t cause any trouble at all, and, apart for being covered in blood, there was no way to connect us ôo it. Running would just draw unnecessary attention; they probably wouldn’t even come asking questions.

Just be safe, though, Ev and I packed the truck up anyway, figuring that it might be time to leave soon. You can never be too sure. Even though the carnage was at least a mile away, the smell was still permeating everything, smoke wafted through the tall pines, and the strobes from the trucks and cars that had eventually rushed to the scene were still flashing in the dark of the early dawn that was finally breaking over the trees.

The smell of burning rubber. The car slid around the corner, lights behind criss-crossing, shining in the mirror, the reflections casting shadows larger than life. Hectic and frightening, a high speed sprint through the city. This was one of those times you shouldn’t be laughing, it was a serious situation. Yet my sides hurt from laughing so hard.

It could have been a better car. The little Dodge Colt struggled through each turn, each curve, it shuddered when you pumped the brakes, it hesitated when you stomped the gas. You could imagine the owner, driving so carefully, not wanting to buy a new car, just hoping this one would get them through one more winter. The speedometer only went to 90, and the needle bounced up and down on the stopper pin by the time we hit the highway.

I was probably the only one that noticed how funny it was when the cigarette she tossed out the window hit the hood of the Crown Victoria, bouncing up the windshield and getting caught under the light rack. Watch the road. The early morning roadway was nearly empty, mostly guys in pickup trucks on the way to construction sites, over worked middle management trying to beat their superiors to work, to finish that project that would surely get them a raise.

“Maybe we went too far this time?” I ventured.

She looked at me, and just screamed at the top of her lungs, “I FUCKING LOVE YOU!” I stomped harder on the accelerator.

Crossing the median, you wouldn’t think a car like this could fly, but it did. We nearly slid out into the other side of the highway, narrowly avoiding oncoming traffic, and headed up an on ramp and through a red light. We were on the other side of the city, now alone on the road we headed for a warehouse district on the river.

“Hey, you alright man?” Everett was hunched over to look up into my face. “You kinda zoned out there a bit.”

“Think we should get out of here?”

“Yeah, let’s do that.”

It is several hours later, Everett is snoring. He always snored. The first time I went to his house, we hung out in his room all night, rocking out and talking about things we thought were cool. After eating dinner with his family, which was excellently prepared, and well thought out, an invitation was extended to spend the night. It was accepted. We played video games all night long trying to beat some level, passing the controller back and forth; I eventually realized that I was the only one still playing. He was passed out on the couch snoring so loud I thought he would wake someone up. He never believed that I beat the final guy.

Road passed by, signs, trees, rocks sped past. We left Everett’s car at a junk yard, there was no front gate, and they weren't quite open yet, so we drove it in, and nestled into the back between an ’82 Ford Pinto, and an early 90’s Grand Am with a note on the windshield saying we would be back for it written in white shoe polish I’d lifted at a gas station along the way, at the same time I had picked up several meals to last us a little while longer on the trip. “Don’t bother reporting this car. You don’t want that kind of attention here. We’ll take care of it.”

Here is where I get stuck every time. This is the point of the story that I have trouble with, although up to this point here none of it made sense, everything after makes even less sense. Everett is sleeping, and I’m driving. I am driving and the world speeds by. Far in the back, Martin is snoozing away, a pointless character in this mess; he is more or less just along for the ride.

Martin’s peaceful innocence is sickening, as is Everett’s. I wonder how they can just sleep while I drive, and I wonder why it pisses me off so much that they do. I couldn’t sleep right now; I couldn’t sleep no matter how desperately I wanted to. I couldn’t sleep if I had pills, the pills you buy in the grocery store, the pills the doctor says you need to take, I couldn’t sleep right now if I downed everything at the health food store that is grown in the basement of some hippy’s house, who takes every cent he makes and invests it in Marijuana, which he grows in the same bed, and sells to the same people buying his sure fire cure for insomnia. Right now the only way I could sleep would be to drive into oblivion, but then we would all be sleeping, and that would be counterproductive. This is the story of my life, but it’s not really about me.

I’m driving and I am changing lanes every so often. I am changing lanes because they are there, and I like knowing that they are there. I’m there, and I'm only person I see for miles and miles, and I am sure I am probably the only person on the roads anywhere anyway, but I keep signaling with every lane change, as if the jack-rabbits and coyotes need to know where I plan on going. Pure habit.

Have you ever felt as if your thoughts are coming so fast that the world is speeding up around you just to keep up? This is my plight right now, this moment, and for some reason I think of the Cosby Show, the old Cosby Show where bill was always wearing some ugly sweater. Those sweaters to me completely personified the eighties. The sweaters make me think of Caitlin and her sweater bunnies; I loved those bunnies so much. Too bad she killed herself and her name isn’t Caitlin.

We scaled the fence. It was at least nine feet tall, I remember wondering if there were specific zoning requirements for this fence. It was in the middle of the city and surrounded the old zoo. I thought about an old news broadcast.

There had been this same fence surrounding the zoo, but there was barbed wire at the top. Apparently, they had some trouble with people breaking into the zoo after hours, which was odd because there was no charge for admission, either way; people were breaking in so they put this barbed wire along the top. At some point some kids tried to break in one night, and one of them slipped and slit their throat on the barbed wire and bled to death just hanging there, so the city changed the laws so that the zoo couldn’t have barbed wire up there, stating that they would increase the police patrols around the zoo. I guess being a municipality the zoo wasn’t expected to hire outside security.

This was an old zoo, one of those classic menageries, animals in cages, which had grown up over the years. The zoo, I mean, not necessarily the animals. It wasn’t spectacular by any stretch of the imagination. Most of the animals you think about when you think about the zoo were there, but there weren’t any super endangered, rare, only 1 of 8 on the planet type animals. Admission was free, but of course, donations were gladly accepted at the gates, where a Salvation Army like donation set up was in place, a series of locked buckets and people asking for money as you walked by. When the place was open, walking around the park was like watching PBS during their pledge drives, there were little announcements telling you how you kept the park open, and all over were these little signs urging you to help out where you could, Volunteers Needed. Legally, volunteering of this nature meant you were paid a minimum wage, so of course a lot of the regular employees were not the shining stars of the community.

Now, the park was dead center in the middle of the city, and there was a long parkway which led to the zoo, a huge plot of park land, a conservatory with arboretum, and a phenomenal picnic area. It was more or less secluded, if the police were patrolling more often, we couldn’t tell. There were houses not more than 1000 feet away or so, but this was its own hidden world. It felt like another place, outside of the regular world.

In the dead of night it was quiet. You could hear the occasional car pulling through the residential area of the parkway, and off in the distance you could pick out a big truck on the main thoroughfare, and even the highway a few miles away. The Muzak still played quietly from the speakers embedded around the base the fencing. You could tell they were supposed to be hidden by the landscaping, but it seemed there were not a lot of donations coming in, since the landscaping wasn’t kept up very well.

The first thing that I’d noticed coming in were the concession carts that had closed down for the night. I had never seen what they looked like all closed up, the large awnings I’d always thought were for shade when you stood in line, closed up like a flower out of the sun, and giant padlocks secured the petals in place until the next day’s business.

We were on our way home after a movie when we decided to stop at one of those big 24 hour department store chains and do some shopping. By that I mean we decided to wander around for a few hours. Something about these places made me laugh, they were great for everyone. You could go during the day, get some dinner, pampers, school clothes, a cell phone, movies, a new desk and kitchen table. At night you could go and pick up bolt cutters, spray paint, a chisel, some Freon Refrigerant, R-134a in the automotive sections, a crowbar, a new duffel bag, black ski masks, or if need be, some nude colored pantyhose. You get the idea, I'm sure.

You would think, just as a common sense sort of thing, that if a couple of people were standing at the only open cash line at 3 o’clock in the morning with everything needed to get you arrested for carrying burglary tools, that maybe a little bell might go off in the head of cashier. To be honest, I am sure this woman wasn’t stupid, but at 3 am, no matter how used to your schedule you are, you have more than likely checked out for the night. Still, I can go to the store, and with a cake and streamers, coca-cola, chips and other various foods streaming down the black conveyor belt, the cashier doesn’t look at you and say, “Looks like someone has a quiet night at home alone planned,” without a hint of sarcasm. Obvious conclusions are drawn.

Something about this story, as I tell it, doesn’t add up. It doesn’t fit together quite right. It’s like that feeling of déjà vu, you know you’ve been there, been here, but the puzzle pieces sliding into place don’t complete the picture. And you know something is wrong but you know you won’t know why until it’s too late.

Rewriting the story, or retelling the tale, you’ve done it before, you’ve even lived it, but it’s not quite the same, you can’t really say it’s better or worse, you can’t say much of anything. It’s still you, it’s the same reflection in an old cloudy mirror, only recognizable, but the details obscured, even just slightly. Forget it and move on, write the words back down.

Soon the urge to punch Everett as hard as possible starts wearing me down, like the drip-drip-dripping of a faucet that just won’t stop. After the body parts and pieces of former homes came raining down on us, I just didn’t understand how he could sleep. It’s clearly not the nervous, restless sleep you’d expect. No, this was the fully restoring like-he’s-in-his-own-bed-at-home-safe-under-the-neatly-3-mortgaged-roof-of-his-parents sleep. For some reason I hate him for it.

He jumps up quickly, grabbing at his shoulder and lower jaw. My fist connected right between the two, where his head had flopped down and lay almost sideways, perpendicular with the line of his arm. It takes him a surprising number of seconds, maybe 15 or 20, to put together what had just happened. The series looks that flashed across his face was more entertainment than I could have hoped for. This is me, sadistic and cruel.

At first his tired face tensed up and he sat up and lurched forward, until the seatbelt caught him. He swung his head left and right and looked down at his lap, as if he didn’t expect to be sitting. Looking at me, looking at him, his face flowed from that look of a puppy being swatted with a newspaper by his master to one of a Rottweiler being kicked by some punk kid who’s about to now get bit.

“What the holy fuck…” his voice was raspy and he coughed once or twice. Time to wake up Everett.

“I’m bored and falling asleep,” that sounded good enough to me.

He just shook his head, “fuck man.”

‘Should have’ is a pretty commonly heard preface to a statement that is usually followed by an obvious statement. As it is written, hind sight is 20-20, and with enough people looking back on a situation, analyzing it and breaking down each component, the visual acuity can probably be better than that. However…

I should have been watching the road instead of Everett. After driving a few hundred miles through the empty desert, your attention to detail becomes lax. Now, when it’s sometime around 3 am somewhere in the country, and you haven’t slept in around a day or so, your reaction time is also affected. So, when your passenger shouts look out, in a near groggy daze, and you look up to see an elephant in the highway spanning all four lanes, you are likely to make a rather rash move, and probably too little too late. This describes what happened next.

SUVs have been known for years for their incredible inability to maneuver quickly with any semblance of agility. Normally, when you crank the wheel at high speeds, let’s call it 90 miles an hour, your vehicle is likely to roll over and over and over, its contents tossed around and battered against surface upon surface. Game over, no reset.

That’s not how it happened though, as I said, my reaction time was slow, very slow. It was stupid slow. By the time I tried turning the wheel and hitting the brakes, a deep red washed over the window and my seat belts were put to the test. And 10 feet later, after the sound of screeching and squishing had subsided, labored breaths and sharp chest pains, we were dead stopped near sideways, out of my window I saw the highway extending for miles and miles in near pitch black darkness under a huge moon.

Everett and I sat there for about an hour or so, give or take an hour, before we looked at each other and got out. Martin is asking what happened in his own way.

He says, “Then we stopped and banged. Ow.”

“Stay there Martin, OK,” and I shut my door.

It turns out that there really aren’t elephants gallivanting about the southwest, however, there is other wildlife out there. In this case, the only guess that Ev and I could come up with was a jaguar. It’s late, and we’re alone on the highway, and walking around looking at the pieces of something splattered everywhere, and partially embedded in my truck about the place where my radiator used to be.

There is something completely surreal about arguing back and forth about whether it was a jaguar or an ocelot or a cougar or a leopard. It wasn’t a coyote, which was the first guess. But all in all, no matter where it came from and what it was, it didn’t matter in least. There was dead thing all over my truck, and although it was still running somehow, it didn’t sound good, and unless we got somewhere before the sun came up and made my now radiator-less engine overheat, we were screwed in every sense of the word.

Still clutching my side, we got back in, and turned on the wipers, and started on our way again, a little more cautiously than before. The world looks different through a windshield smeared with the blood of something that had been alive only few minutes before, and about half a tank of washer fluid later the view hadn’t improved much. The sign on the side of the road flew by telling us we were only 10 miles from a service station, memories of horror movies about small towns off of desert highways got me thinking, but only for the next 8 minutes. How did I end up here, and where was I going?

That early in the morning, every animal seemed to be sleeping, even those nocturnal critters that should have been up and about. This was the exact reason we were there, well one of them anyway. It was unbelievable that so many years of evolution could be thrown away because the animals were being forced to adapt to the handlers schedules. There were so many idealistic reasons we were there, but none of them are really all that important.

Scuffing shoes, sand scraping across the asphalt, echoing everywhere, but still nearly completely silent. During the day this place would be bustling with people and kids, field trips, and family outings, cheap, but effective dates. The smell of fried food wafting and garbage cans filled with discarded food and drink pounded by sunlight that mixed in the air; a sickly sweet smell that seemed eerily missing now.

Men at Work’s, Land Down Under plays softly with an odd assortment of electronic instruments, piped quietly through the Muzak speakers every few feet. I would swear the vocals are being reproduced on an oboe, a tuba replacing the bass. We reached the small outdoor primate cage, our target. It was where all the little monkeys were kept, outside the main primate exhibit, which housed the chimpanzees, orangutans and apes.

This was an octagonal shaped cage; it looked like a metal gazebo with bars. It was about 7 feet tall and inside was filled with small tree branches and natural foliage for the small primates to hide amongst. These were the spider and squirrel monkeys and several other tiny little monkeys, all crammed together unnaturally for people to gawk at. According to the sign most of the creatures were from the rain forests of South America, but some were apparently from an entirely different continent, somewhere in the middle of Africa.

The cage, much like the menageries of old, was not designed for spaciousness, I doubt more than two people could have fit inside together. Not that the little monkeys needed all that much room, but if you think about these creatures being ripped from the jungles and rain forests and put into a little gazebo in the Midwest United States, it seems ludicrously small.

“Ok, so now what?” she looked at me, somewhat puzzled. Normally she was the idea man, making up the plans as we go along. Now, I was calling the shots, I didn’t tell her what we were doing, so she was just along for the ride, and now she seemed a little out of her element. It was cute because she hadn’t figured it out.

I set down my duffel, and told her to do the same. I started telling her about the plight of these little monkeys, and those of all the creatures in this zoo. I told her about normal zoos, the way they took care of the animals and the things that were supposed to happen, but that wasn’t the case here. Here was a throwback to the days of old, where families would dress in their Sunday best and stream past tiny cages in lines, women feigning surprise and fear at the exotic beasts, men puffing out their chest, emulating the low browed gorillas. Now, people were educated and should understand these things better. We were going to set the monkeys free.

She looked at me, with a slightly dazed look in her eyes. She didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Most of what we did was more focused on corporate greed, and political unrest. She had this look on her face, “why are you going all green peace on me?”

She didn’t say anything; she just started walking around the cage, looking it over. Her mind going over the same details that mine was, these bars were a lot thicker than a pair of bolt cutters could handle, and even if they could, I sincerely doubted that we’d be strong enough to bend the bars with our bare hands.

“Alright, obviously I didn’t really think this through. Do you have any better ideas?”

“As a matter of fact,” she looked at me, a twinkle in her eye, a light from inside her shined. I hadn’t really noticed, but we had been talking so quietly, but when she said this her voice raised up a bit, the excitement of the moment, and she jumped some and stopped short when one of the small primates awoke, leaping from its hiding place to a branch closer to her, letting out a small screech as it did. It grasped the twig like perch with four tiny little hands, looking at her, cocking its head back and forth trying to figure her out. After a minute it yawn, its tiny head opening wide and it hopped back under a small bush, presumably to go back to sleep. Bored with people.

“Ok, so what is this matter of fact?”

“Well, when life gives you lemons, you make orange juice, right?” She asked, spouting a perfect anti-cliché, she walked around to where I was standing, stooped down, and started digging in the duffle bag I’d set down next to me. While she did this, I stared down at the pink and purple striped thong sticking out the top of her pants, low rise khakis were probably not the best choice for skulking clothes, but I was not about to start complaining now.

She rooted around for a minute or so before producing a pair of black spray paint cans and tossed both of them up at me at the same time. While I bent over to pick up the one I dropped, still focusing on the loud clatter it made, aluminum and steel, and a small steel ball bouncing around on the asphalt, she pulled a small black pouch out oæ her pants pocket. Standing up I watched her pull the small, ribbon like, strings out of their neatly tied bow and it rolled open. She had the lock-pick kit.

This was one of those times I felt compelled to ask her a question, “Why do you have that?” I think its better that I didn’t, I was sure this was just one of those things she would tell me about if I was supposed to know. That was the nature of our relationship, everything was on a need to know basis, and really there wasn’t much that I needed to know. Of course in all honesty, I didn’t really care why she had it, just that I hadn't known about it before now.

“So, do you want to time me, or what?”

I didn’t, but I pretended to while she worked the deadbolt on the door. She had this tendency of sticking her tongue out just a little bit while she was concentrated, I sometimes worried that one time she would just concentrate a little too hard, and somehow after falling and stumbling, just bite the tip of her tongue right off.

I regret not timing her; it didn’t take her any time at all before she had the lock undone, and the door swung open with a creak loud enough to wake the dead lying in some necropolis on the other side of the world. You wouldn’t expect these little creatures to go running from their tiny metal gulag, after all this was their lives, but not even one looked at the door, matter of fact most of them stayed asleep without even stirring a little.

Caitlin and I set to work on our message, arguing a bit about what to say, and then about what it meant. Eventually we decided, and in huge sprawling black letters that would make any tagger, subvertiser, or other spray-paint toting miscreant-artist cry, we left our mark.

FREE BUT NOT HOME

ROAMING A NEW BIGGER PRISON

LET US GO

To be honest, I have no idea how many of those little monkeys finally left, we shooed a few out, but they seemed to be upset about the whole thing, and neither of us were interested in being bitten by a monkey.

We rolled into town as the sun was coming up. The sign on the highway read, “Narrows Gulch – 10 mi.” Taking the exit, rolling off to a stop, a sign with a small arrow read, “Narrows Gulch, Left,” and after more than half an hour of driving with the needle on the speedometer barely bouncing above the 30 M.P.H. mark now, I started the think that the sign was more literal than I’d initially conceived.

It seemed to take hours, but really it couldn’t have been more than an hour and a half from the turn off from the highway, before we rolled past a small weathered white hand-painted sign that read, “Welcome to Narrows Gulch, Last ANYTHING Forever.” The paint flaking off of it so that the top of the sign was nothing more than bleached wood, at the bottom in small letters was the word Population, the entry left blank.

The night sky was just beginning to give way to morning, but fought hard. With so many miles of flat desert, only a few hills in the distance, it was a gentle pink gradation as day pushed up in the east. It was still too dark to really see anything of the town, but it was clearly small town U.S.A.

“Damn, horror movie set?”

“No kidding,” I said looking back and forth for a service station, a small sign caught my eye, “20”.

“I actually have to slow down here; it’s a twenty mile speed limit.”

[Last edit – Wednesday, March 07, 2007]

There wasn’t much to see as we rolled slowly down the street; it wasn’t much of a town. Actually, it didn’t really seem to be a town at all. You could see all the streets in every direction, and there weren’t many. We were on the main street, and it seemed to continue straight for as far as you could see, and in the flat land of the desert, that was quite a distance. There were a few intersections but they didn’t seem to go far, there were small residential areas on either side of the main street, which only seemed to extend in a 3 block square, after that it was just desert, a lot of desert. There were several buildings huddle together against the oppressive wind of the desert.

The first building we came to was the service station; there was a big fluorescent sign out front which was lit up that said ‘Speedeez’. It was broken, and one of the big tubes inside of it was flickering over and over with a relentless buzz. The letters were a made up to be red, white, blue, striped horizontally, but the paint was flecked and faded, and most of the effect was gone. The sign itself stood and a pole, probably about 8 feet high, painted black, but you could tell even in the low lighting, that it had been painted many times before, and the unevenness said that there was probably a lot of painted under the most recent coat, and around the base of the pole was a yellowed dried patch of tumbleweed, which just trembled in the breeze. This is where we pulled in, the engine steaming and dying.

It was a small service station, with a pair of gas pumps in front, and one of those small air tubes that makes a bell ring when you drive over it. We pulled in front of the garage door and I fell asleep. It was a wonderful sleep that, until the sound of a big Mag Flashlight clicking against my window, had me dreaming of rolling across the American Southwest. I woke up half thinking we were rolling over into a ditch or something, I should have known better since I could still clearly hear the sound of the road humming beneath the tires.

“You boys alright in there?”

The guy standing outside my window looked like a rat wearing a beat up blue baseball cap with its bill rolled up. Every part of his face seemed to come to a point, from his chin to the tip of his nose, and every point was smudged with something. He was garbed in dirty blue overalls stained black, and shining in the new morning sun just peaking over the horizon, with thick grease patches. Each patch was smeared thick with grease, while the thinner fluid bled out from each spot and expanded giving a raised texture to each stain. Even with the baseball cap you could see that his hair was long, black and slicked back out of the back, I doubted that he had any need for hair care products.

Rolling the window down, I was instantly hit with the stench of his halitosis, I had this feeling the man started each day with a stick of jerky and a mountain dew, but of course I had no basis for this. His face was pressed against the glass, and as it slid down his nose left a streak of grease. His teeth were an awful pale yellow, caked in plaque. The man was in desperate need of hygiene. When he spoke a blast of stink plumed from his mouth and filled the cabin of the car. A little fear crept into the back of my mind that I would never get the stink out of the fabric.

“Can I help you fellas?” He asked us with this mock look of concern on his face, at least that is the look I think he was trying to give; it was really hard to tell. His voice was raspy, and high pitched, and his accent matched his appearance.

“Yeah,” I was almost awake now, “we hit something on the highway, messed up the Jimmy pretty bad.”

“Why’d you drive all the way down here then?”

“It was the only thing listed for another hundred miles,” I really wanted to ask him why he asked such a stupid question, but I thought that maybe I should be nice to him. I felt really uncomfortable, like that feeling you get when you are at a party, but you don’t seem to know a single person there.

“What’d ya hit?”

“I’m not sure, an animal of some kind I think,” Now I was just getting perturbed, what difference did it make what animal I had hit? Just grin and bear it.

“Well, you fellers want I should take a look at her?”

“That’d be great,” gritting my teeth I tried as hard as I could to hide the sarcastic urges I was feeling, and held my fist down, rather than hitting him full in the face. I don’t know if I mentioned it before but I have absolutely no tolerance for stupid comments, and even less for stupid people. This is bad considering that there are a lot of stupid people in the world, so more often than not you need to work with them, keep them happy. Does that make me sound narcissistic?

Opening the door, I realized how hot it already was, the sun was barely hanging above the earth on the horizon, but already it was at least 70. Growing up in the Midwest you get used to waking up to cool air and dew on the grass, but the desert was a whole other animal. It was dry and there wasn’t much of breeze, so the air just hung, wrapping around me. I really didn’t want to know what it was going to be like once the afternoon came rolling over us.

“Alrighty, we should try and get her in the garage then, can you still start her?”

I turned the key, and the engine went with it over and over, but never starting, after four or five tries, we gave up. Everett and our mechanic pushed from behind while I steered us into the left stall of the garage. Martin just stood and watched; I had actually almost forgotten he was even still around. He hadn’t said a word in at least the last day and a half. It took all of us two heaves to get it over the gutter under the door. Once the behemoth was finally where it needed to be, we all collapsed breathing heavily; Martin meandered in and stood by the door, his hands in his pockets.

“The name is Elmer by the way,” he said as he walked toward me from behind the truck, his hand stuck out in front of him. I took it and we exchanged pleasantries, and I introduced Everett and Martin. “I’ll need to look it over, might take a while, there is a lunch counter right down the street, should be open about now, you can grab yourselves some coffee or breakfast or something.”

It was a classic looking garage, in the other stall there was an old 50’s Chevy Pick-up, which was mostly torn apart from stem to sternum. There were tools on the walls, and several large cabinets, there were old-fashioned tin signs and at least one license plate from every state hung here and there between the racks and shelves. The interior paint was a pale blue pocked with imperfections from the concrete it was covering.

“Great, thanks,” Everett and I walked out the way we came and Martin tailed close behind. In the daylight the main street seemed to have a whole different personality. There was diagonal parking on both sides of the street in front of several shops of all varieties. Everything was old and faded, bricks were broken, paint was peeling, and several of the stores along the strip were boarded up with hand painted signs reading closed. The little restaurant was right where Elmer said it would be.

The half lit sign above the door read ‘LuAnn’s Place’; it was a small acrylic box, that didn’t quite cover the bare spot from the previous tenant of the spot. The bottom pane of glass in the door was missing; in its place was an old dirty piece of plywood. A bell jingled when the door opened and we stepped inside.

There were ten tables, all of them old and worn, you could see where coffee cups had sat, and plates were spun to get all the pancakes and eggs at the best angle. Everything was red, a dark red almost burgundy color, the walls and ceiling, and the carpet except in the main tracks where it was worn and turning white. Since there were no windows there were plenty of pictures and paintings, all of them of nature, none of it indigenous. On the left was a small, six seat lunch counter with a big bakery rack, and a cash register, behind it was the kitchen, with nothing separating us but the big open griddle. When you stepped all the way in you saw that there was a small spiral staircase with cast iron railings, possibly leading to more seating, but we didn’t really look.

The waitress, also in red, with a hairnet over the bun in her hair pushed up to back of her head, was reading a magazine behind the counter. As she stepped in she didn’t look up, there was no one else but the three of us. When we didn’t just sit down she said without looking up, “Well, come on in.”

“Elmer said you had the best breakfast in town,” I looked over at Ev, who was sitting down at the first booth against the far wall, and I followed him. The waitress still didn’t look up, but laughed so that the bun on her head shook a little.

“Sweetie, we have the only breakfast in town,” She looked up finally, “Want some coffee to start, you look like you can use it?”

“Sure,” the classic insult, does anyone look good if they look tired?

We sat down and she came over with a pot in hand. She was taller than I’d first thought, and reasonably attractive, in her early to mid-thirty’s she had a very kind face. I expected her to lay down some menus at the same time, but instead she just pulled her pad out of a pocket on her apron and asked if we knew what we wanted.

“You don’t have menus?”

“Nah, it’s pretty straight forward, you want it, we make it, and you pay a fair price.”

“Sounds good, can I get two eggs fried over hard and a small stack of griddle cakes, and a couple of sausages?” I was oddly craving breakfast, and I really didn’t know where the order came from, but as soon as she asked I just blurted it out.

“Mmm-kay, any toast or hash browns Hun?”

I declined and Everett ordered his usual, cheese and onion omelet and bacon. Martin didn’t say anything, so we just ordered him some pancakes. Martin had been oddly silent for quite a while, and I was starting to get a little worried about him, but of course it made sense once I thought about it. The guy was now way out of his element; I just wondered what to do about it.

The food came, and we chatted a bit with Alice, our server, and she told us a little about the town. Apparently the majority of the work in the town came from a mine just outside the limits on the far side, and apart from that what we saw on the main street was it. I remember asking her is there were any other towns further down, and she literally guffawed, it seemed this was the only town within 20 miles in any direction, and that was crow flying, not road travel.

I also asked who LuAnn was, and Alice explained that she had no idea, because the diner had been LuAnn’s Place since she could remember, no one bothered to change, even her boss, who happened to be a lot of peoples boss. A man named Irving Kinsley apparently owned just about everything in the area, and conveniently enough he was also the mayor of Narrows Gulch.

We settled up with Alice, thanked her and headed out the door, the bells jingling above us. All things considered, the certain lack of supply in such a demand, the bill was very cheap, and we left Alice a very nice tip to boot.

The Sheriff met us outside LuAnn’s Place as we walked back toward Speedeez; I guessed that Elmer had been kind enough to let him know about the new folks in town, and for some reason I really thought the words ‘city slickers’ were used at some point. I felt like I was watching a bad B-Movie from the 70’s, the man was wearing a brown uniform shirt, with tan pockets, his badge hung off the shirt loosely, perfectly shining gold badge flashed in the morning sunlight much like the mirrored aviator sunglasses that took up a little more than half of his face. His tan uniform pants had a brown stripe running down the sides of his legs, disappearing into his dusty black cowboy boots.

“Ne-ow, what happened he-er boy,” he asked looking me in the eye, I think, the word boy pulled up out of the air in a staccato burst, a little spray of spit came out. As he opened one side of his mouth, the other side clearly stuffed with chaw, a brown dribble rolled out of the corner and down through and over the stubble on his chin, this early in the morning and somehow he had 5 O’clock shadow.

Everett stepped forward a little bit, I’m sure he figured that I would put us on his bad side, and being that he had at least had a chance to sleep, he more than likely was a better choice for representative. He started, “we had a bit of an accident…”

The sheriff turned a bit, “Ne-ow, that’s a lot of blood, you boys know you were driving through a nash-nal wil’life refuge, killing anything out here is considered a fed’ral offense,” he turned back toward me, his lips curled up over his stained teeth in a twisted half-smile, you could smell the reek of coffee and chewing tobacco wafting through the dry air, “you didn’t hurt any of the animals with that big ol’ thing there, ne-ow, did ya?”

I wanted so badly to ask him if it would have been better if we’d hit some vagrant instead, but even in my overly exhausted state I was able to think better of it. The thought of getting into a heated discussion took me back to that horror movie vibe I got coming in, I imagined how this man killing us then dumping us somewhere, we weren’t exactly waiting for back-up here.

Everett started again, the Sheriff turned backed toward him, his upper body not moving with the rest. “Well, sir, I’m not sure what we hit, but we hit it in the middle of the road in the black of night, it really was an accident.”

The expression on his face changed, like a curtain rising on a stage. The edges of his lips began to rise with his eyebrows, until he was in a full smile. “Don’t worry y’all, happens all the time, we get people come through here a few times a month, I really got ya goin there though, didn’t I?”

Everett looked at me a bit uneasily, faking a smile, but I felt it necessary to break the coming uncomfortable silence, “You do that to all of them?”

He chuckled a bit, his voice rasped and cracked, “yeah, you should see it when a family comes through with their kids, and they all think they’re going to jail!” He calmed down a bit, caught his breath, “I’m Luther Morgan, I am the law around here.”

He stuck his hand out at me, which I took; he squeezed hard, and shook harder, as if proving a point. Brief introductions went around, and we were left there with nothing else to say, and after a very long minute I suggested we go see how the car was coming.

A few minutes later we were walking into the open garage door behind the spare tire of the Jimmy, and around to find to find Elmer wiping his hands on a dingy red shop rag soaked in oil. His hands were permanently blackened; finger nails were a light pink from the edge to the tip where they changed to a dark brown and black like an inverted French manicure. When he saw me walking in he started shaking his head.

“Well, the radiator is cracked straight through the middle, and driving it as far as you did over heating may have blown the head, the alternator was dislodged and one of the blades from the fan is long gone,” he stopped, and then walked over, “there’s a few more things, but basically, she’s ‘Rest in Peace’. Parts are gonna take a while, she aint new, and there sure as shit aint no GM dealers around here.”

“How much?”

“Well, it won’t be cheap, and you’ll be needing a place to stay for a little while.”

“Shit.”

Dear Diary, I’m trapped in the middle of bumfuck Arizona with no car, no money, no job, and no place to stay, I’m about as fucked as they come. But, bless mommy and daddy, and please let Samantha ask me to the Sadie Hawkins dance. I’m falling apart at the seams.

The Narrows Gulch Hotel was real close, within walking distance, imagine that. The building itself was about the oldest in the town. It was relatively plain looking from the outside, two stories tall and about three times wider than any of the store fronts or apartments. The inside of the building was another story, however. The walls covered with fine looking art. There were also Native American pieces as well, Kachina dolls and masks with feathers on them. The front desk itself was ornately etched oak with a solid marble top. Behind the desk was a black hook rack, which looked like it was made from obsidian, it was shiny and reflective. The lights that hung from the ceiling were all converted from chandeliers, most of which looked like they used to hold candles or lamps of some type, but were very clean crystal. Next to the key rack was a group of mail slots and to the left of that was a small office adorned with wrought iron bars bent in ingenious vine shapes. The carpet was a deep crimson red. All along the edges were gold accent leaf patterns on blue fields. There was actually gold everywhere, on the railings of the stair case and the pillars in the center of the room. There was even a gold leaf on the soffits.

The world I was in was completely foreign to me, but, as it stood, I was going to be stuck there for a while. It seemed only fitting that I make the best of things. It was time, unfortunately, to get a job. In this place, there was only one thing that I was qualified for. Cheap labor.