Eyeheart Everything (10 page)

Then we hit some traffic, some sort of road construction, and slowed to an occasional creep. It got hot. We rolled up the windows and turned on the A/C but the A/C had a bad smell of mildew and people got nauseous so we turned it off and rolled the windows back down. Traffic continued to almost not move for another half-hour. We drank all of the water — there was only a gallon for all seven of us, and all of our sodas were also gone, and all of the ice in them, and the paper cups and plastic lids and straws were crunching up on the freshly cleaned carped below.

We were thirsty and hot. We all knew there was a case of beer in the trunk, cooling in a cooler full of ice, and I knew it was going to come to that, but as the driver and the one whose license was at stake I didn’t like the idea too much. Also the car behind us had a cell-phone, and there were “Report Drunken Drivers 1-800-SAV-A-LIF” signs every twenty miles or so.

As we crept closer and began to round a corner, I saw three lanes of traffic trying to merge together into one lane in a very tight space, and beyond that I saw a long row of cop cars and two ambulances, and just beyond that I started to see some wreckage.

Keith pointed out that if we were going to get the beers out of the trunk we ought to do it soon before we were any closer to all those cops. And he yanked the keys out of the ignition and jumped out and went around and pulled the big blue box that reads Pabst Blue Ribbon Par-T-Pak legibly from 100 feet away out of the trunk and slammed the trunk lid harder than it needs to be slammed and hopped back in the car and slammed that door, also unnecessarily hard, and gave everybody a beer, and I had one too. They were cold and good. Then he tried to hide the rest of the case of beer under his feet with limited success.

We continued to creep slowly forward. We had been there nearly an hour. Rebecca said nothing and the look on her face told me I would need to stop at the next available service station featuring sanitary indoor toilet facilities, and it better be soon. She had no beer. The three-lane merge was horrible. Everybody honked at everybody, people just leaned on their horns non-stop, as two gigantic Winnebagos together blocked off the mergers from the left so that a long row of other Winnebagos could cut in front of the rest of traffic. The cops didn’t seem to notice or care. They were everywhere, chattering into the radios on their shoulders, looking very serious and kind of agitated. Eventually we got around the corner some more and the one wrecked car I had seen became two, three, five wrecked cars, and a motorcycle, and further on there was a rescue team surrounding another smaller car.

We crept on, heads craned out the window. I just wanted to go away, but even after we got merged together into one lane the traffic continued to crawl. Keith saw something, and then Kevin and Sparrow saw it, and then I saw it: underneath a red hatchback that had rolled on its driver’s side, an arm stuck out at an angle that couldn’t have left it attached to anything. And tucked behind the hatchback, kind of hidden, an opaque brown plastic bag covered something dead and person-shaped on the ground, and there was a large fluorescent orange sticker affixed to it that said REMAINS. We all got very quiet and drank more beer and tried to stop looking. We crawled on past four more smashed cars. You could see by the scrapes and scratches on the road that they had all been dragged aside by trucks. One old Volvo had a head-impact shatter on the windshield, bloody brown, and the entire front end was smashed into a wedge like it had tried to fit under some other car. And the Volvo had a bag on the ground behind it too.

Rebecca screamed Let me out! Open the Door and we tried to calm her down but she bolted over Sparrow and out the door and began to run around in a circle, looking for something that wasn’t there that she desperately needed, and then as she twisted she threw up all over the roadside next to us in a long ugly arc of vomit. And then Scott got out of the car nonchalantly on the right rear side, and I watched him in the right-side mirror as he threw up neatly in the roadside on top of part of where Rebecca threw up, and then the car behind us stopped and a fat lady opened her door and didn’t even get out, just puked right there next to her car and shut the door again. I got very queasy myself. Then suddenly the cars in front of us got some speed and started taking off, and the lady in the car behind us leaned on her horn, and some of the police started looking towards us, so we all got back in the car and drove on.

We finally got back to three lanes and traffic was thinner than ever, and we all felt kind of awful. I stopped at the next BP, but Rebecca said she didn’t need anything and just wanted to go, and everybody got pissed off at me for stopping without any need to stop. So we got back on the road. We were about thirty miles from the beach, and the sky was getting cloudy. The car reeked of beer and the cans were littered all over the floor. I asked everybody to pick up the trash and put it in the beer box, and a couple of people halfheartedly picked up a few things.

Kevin then said Does anybody want some pot? And Sparrow said Oh got I NEED some pot! and everybody concurred. I didn’t say anything. I felt a little bit light-headed but I was just not wanting to worry anybody, or bum anybody out, or bring anybody down, or further threaten the enjoyability of our Sunday at the beach, which we had planned for a week and which was perhaps our last chance where all seven of us would be free on the same Sunday, our last fun-trip of that summer. I just wanted everybody to stop feeling bad and start having a good time. Kevin loaded his big glass pipe and passed it around the car. I wasn’t going to smoke any myself, but then I did.

And then it was like we all finally started to relax and enjoy each other’s company. Finally. Keith invented a new game, called “Pileup”, in which the back-seat inhabitants would attempt to form a pile of mangled human bodies as in a car wreck. They would have ten seconds to arrange themselves, and then they had to Freeze while Keith took polaroids for insurance purposes. Everybody had the best dead-mangled faces. Then Kevin started singing Two Dozen Beers Six Sodas And Four Buds On The Wall, Two Dozen Beers Six Sodas And Four Buds ... and we sang that for a while, and then we broke into several simultaneous conversations about various fascinating topics. I just got into driving, and meditated on each driving maneuver, and kept my speed at exactly the legal limit and practiced staying perfectly and unwaveringly in-lane. The sky became dark grey but nobody really noticed. You could begin to smell the sea. We’d be there soon.

And when we got there, the fun we would have. Real American summertime Fun, the kind we used to have all the time, the kind we are always complaining that we never have any more. It makes life bearable, this Fun, the elaborate and time-consuming and crowded and dangerous and intoxicated pursuit of it. I began to realize that for all my efforts at calmness and concentration, I couldn’t tell if I was staying inside my lane or not. My eyes were jerked around by details on the roadside as we drove. Signs for smoked fish outlets, and garage sales, and explanations of local parking policy. We passed a dying shed with a dying Japanese pickup truck next to it. And then up ahead, on the right side, next to a large gravelly turn-out I saw a hippie with his thumb out, and I always pick up hippies. So I automatically flipped the turn signal and started pulling to the side of the road, and slowing down, or so I thought. Keith said Woah there when I got the right side onto the gravel. Rebecca made a squeak noise. The hippie was looking right at me. He was skinny and had a little mustache and long black hair with beads or something in it. He was stepping back from the roadside. I realized I was still moving kind of fast.

So I applied a bit more brake, and then I had the strangest sensation of the entire globe beneath us being spun in circles while we remained in the car, completely still. I had my seat belt on. Someone started screaming about three seconds into the spin, I think it was Angie. Everybody else was transfixed. I gripped the wheel and sort of spun it left and right in a futile effort as the road that used to be behind us came around from our left, crossed our right, and then the bank of trees, and then right dead ahead of us, the hippie again, who leapt up off the ground quite amazingly, rose above us and landed in some condition on the roof. Then our spin ended with a metallic shock to the rear right side, and we were again attached to the earth. Angie stopped screaming.

We all checked, we all seemed to be okay. I got out and looked at the hippie, who was sitting on his ass on the slightly dented roof, just staring at me with fear in his eyes. I asked, are you hurt? He didn’t say anything, but he slowly slid down the back window onto the trunk lid, which had popped loose and flapped under him, and then to the ground, where he stood. Everybody was getting our of the car at this point, looking around them. Behind us, coming from the roadway, the skid we’d made was angular and crazy, didn’t even look like a car’s tracks. Keith said, What the fuck was that all about? I wandered around to the right-hand side of the car, where it had struck some concrete-filled steel post that jutted up to protect some kind of gas or water metering equipment that rose out of the earth, sprouted a set of dials and boxes, and then sank back underground.

Then I decided I would like to lie down, so I laid down on the gravel and stared up into the overcast sky. We had to be mere inches from the sea by now, the smell was everywhere. Everybody crowded around me quite suddenly, shouting Mike, Mike, what’s wrong, Mike? Wake up! No fun, I said. Mike, did you faint? This is no fun. We had all the tools of Fun, and we had a Fun Plan and the will to achieve it, and a Funmobile, and yet there is no fun. Where did it go? I thought I caught a drop of water in my right eye.

That dude’s drunk! I heard a voice say, it was the hippie, the guy I wanted to provide a lift to. I got up off the ground and felt suddenly totally sober. Hey man, I said, I’m really extremely sorry. I was pulling over to give you a lift and I think I had a blowout. Are you all right?

He looked at me very intensely, at my clothing, at my face, at my car. I said: I’m fine now, I just fainted for a minute. From the shock, I think. Are you okay?

He was pretty obviously okay, just standing there looking at me. I said: do you still need a ride?

Thanks, dude, but I don’t really wanna ride with you, he said.

I said, Okay, do you need a doctor or anything?

I’m not sure brah, I’m just ... kind of broke, that’s all.

We ended up giving him sixty bucks for no particular reason except because I had almost killed him, and I gave him my name and address and phone number so he could come back and sue me later. Keith and I decided that the trip might go smoother if he drove the rest of the way. So he managed to rip the car free of the post — the body panels had sort of crumpled in around both sides of it, so it took some extensive forward-and-reverse to free the vehicle — and we decided that while the cosmetic damage was pretty gory, the frame was still straight and the tires were intact and no crucial systems were damaged except the right rear taillight, and of course the trunk latch. We didn’t have any rope to tie it closed with, but Kevin said we could use his guitar strap, so Scott went to get it out of the trunk. Kevin said No, I’ll get it, then Scott said No, really, he’d get it, and Kevin said Wait a minute, my guitar, and Scott, who had already had a look in there, didn’t say anything. Kevin had a look in the trunk, came back with the guitar strap and part of the guitar neck still tied to it, and that about killed off all the remaining fun.

We all felt sick. Rebecca hadn’t said a word during the entire spinout debacle. She stood by herself near the edge of the clearing, facing into the clearing and away from us. At one point the hippie tried to make some small talk with her. I saw him approach and then stop and turn around and march resignedly back to the roadside, apparently due to something she’d muttered under her breath. Moments later, a VW Jetta with a cell-phone antenna pulled over and picked the hippie up. A woman in the back seat, cradling the phone to her ear, eyed us maliciously. It occurred to me that we had been there a while and ought to get going.

It was late afternoon. Kevin tied up the trunk hatch with the entrails of his guitar. I climbed into the back seat middle position, the “Lucky Pierre” position which nobody usually wants, and we all got back in the car except for Rebecca. Keith honked the horn and called her name, but she ignored him. He got out and talked to her for about ten minutes, during which time at least one police car slowed down while passing us on the highway. He came back and explained that Rebecca had decided to stay. There was a brief discussion, but Keith started the car and backed up near the roadside, then put the gears in Drive in order to depart. We watched Rebecca, but she was still turned away. I thought I saw a weird brownish blotch on her butt, but it occurred to me that it was probably just dust from sitting in the roadside dirt.

Keith began to pull into traffic, and then James and Sparrow protested that we couldn’t just leave her, we had to take her with us, by force if necessary. So Keith pulled off the road again, honked at loudly by a semi as he did so. James and Sparrow got out of both back doors, walked over to where Rebecca was sitting at the edge of the clearing, head in her hands, and then Scott got out, and walked over there, and I watched as together, on some signal, they all actually grabbed her and started to haul her struggling body back to the car. She screamed earnestly. Scott got her torso from behind and James and Sparrow each held one kicking leg. She screamed some more, and another cop car, or perhaps it was the same cop car, drove past us again very slowly.

Rebecca’s kicking and screaming body was hurled on top of me, and James and Sparrow climbed in on either side of us, preventing escape. Then Rebecca bit my hand. And it fucking hurt.