The Damned Highway (3 page)

Aluminum Shit Tubes Four Hundred Miles Long . . . The Bilious Man-Boobery of Dogbane Fiends . . . Twenty-Ounce Margaritas Lined with the Blood of the Industrial Proletariat . . . Pardon Me, Waiter, but There Is a Three-Lobed Burning Eye in My Starfish . . . The Power of Names and Cuff Links . . . The Ibogaine Effect Redux

——

I haven't actually spent much time on buses. In Colorado, there are very few, of course. Mass transit is like the varicose veins of the aging East, tortuous and dilated, pushing oxygen-starved ham and eggers to the outskirts in the evenings, only to suck them back into the diseased heart of the city at dawn. Out West, the wanderer is king. Whether it's the Great White Freaks in their jam-packed Falcons or VW microbuses getting off on the thin air of Colorado, or fourteen-year-old farm girls who were born with stick shifts in one hand, everyone drives everywhere.

In the cities of the East, I'd learned the easy way that buses were for the Bad Craziness. They're the worst of both worlds to begin with—you're stuck in a tube full of lunatics, just like the subway, and also stuck in traffic at the same time, just like a taxicab. One time in New York City, when I was rushing uptown to the
New York Times
, I made the near-fatal error of taking the bus instead of just hailing a cab and expensing it. Walking would have been better. She sat down next to me, a girl who looked like she had come right off another bus, a Greyhound perhaps, hailing from some dying New England mill town. She was blond, with hair so light that it was nearly colorless, and thin like a tree in autumn. She didn't return my smile, but instead looked down at her hands and played with her fingernails. When the bus lurched into the streets, it started.

“I'll fuck for horse,” she said.

“What?”

“I'll fuck for horse,” she said, this time a little louder, but she wasn't talking to me. She was talking to anyone who'd listen.

“Get a grip on yourself,” I told her, but I don't think she understood me. I am afflicted with a Southern accent, and some people say I'm given to mumbling. The girl stared at me for a moment and then turned away.

A little louder came the third time: “I'll fuck for horse.”

I thought about rummaging through my leather kit bag and pulling out my tape recorder, but I had a head full of acid then, too, though not the quality of Jack Kirby, and my fingers felt like tiny sausages.

“I'll
fuck
for
horse
.”

By the time we were three blocks uptown, everyone in the bus could hear her, though many of her fellow commuting citizens tried not to. “I. Will. FUCK. For. HORSE.” Her affect never changed; she could have been reading from a phone book, but she cranked up the volume with every iteration, stating a fact as plain and obvious as the times of the tides, or the black, ichor-drenched heart of President Nixon. This girl, this sweet young thing who was probably not even three years removed from Girl Scouts and 4-H ribbons and maybe a summer job at the movie house—a theater that would never even show a restricted film—was ready to spread for anyone who could bring her some heroin. Not only that, she had obviously already burned through every connection she had, the phalanxes of eager would-be boyfriends and pimps who'd make sure she'd get fucked for horse three times a day, and fucked for pay seven additional times just to keep their own lights on and their own drug supplies flowing, had been chased out of the wretched alleyways of the Lower East Side and the needle-rich parks of Greenwich Village and found herself on a city bus, offering to fornicate with any of the elderly ladies who might just happen to have some black tar nestled in with their Entenmann's crumb cake and Hotel Bar unsalted butter.

Heroin is a useless drug, and I don't endorse it. I don't endorse any drugs, actually, though there are many who say I do. That's one of the problems with being me. People read magazine articles about me, and they believe them. Half the things attributed to me are things I never actually said—or don't remember saying. And when it comes to drugs, all I've said is that they have always worked for me. But horse is not my bag.

By the time the bus pulled up at Union Square, the girl had found a taker. She didn't make eye contact with me when she stood up to allow his big canned ham of a hand to clamp down on her shoulder and lead her off the bus, but he did. He wasn't a young guy, but instead looked like pretty much any regional assistant manager of a savings and loan might. He could have been a Rotarian, or an Odd Fellow, or one of the Knights of Columbus, or the guy who has a dolly in his garage just in case someone on the block needs help installing their new combination washer-dryer. His eyes glittered, and he smiled a tight little smile over his teeth. If I'd had my .44 magnum—I left it in the hotel safe, along with some loose bills, half a gram of cocaine, and a Moleskine—I would have put him out of my misery right then and there.

But never mind that, eh? Now here I am again on a Greyhound bus, the sort of bus young girls take to reinvent themselves as junk-addled whores in Manhattan or Los Angeles. And I am going the wrong way—into the wilds of the New England hills, instead of screaming away from them. But that is where the trip's taking me in this search for the American Nightmare. It's enough to almost make me long for the bum I met at the terminal back in Denver, if only so I'd have some conversation. There are few people on the bus: a driver who looks like he ate his own weight in pancakes this morning, a Hispanic girl hugging herself and staring out into the faux star field of the parking lot and its flickering lamps, a skinny little guy with his hair slicked back with pomade and a flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a few random and shadowy shapes sitting in that extended last row by the chemical-smelling lavatory.

It occurs to me that we all have something in common, my fellow passengers and I. This is 1972. There is the youth vote now, thanks to the lowering of the voting age to eighteen, and the black vote, all the more important now that the hoses have been turned off and the police dogs corked fang by fang, and then there are the rest of us—the freak vote. Seventy-two promises to be a tight election, and the candidates are more or less identical—for all the blood on his hands, Richard Nixon isn't all that different than Gene McCarthy or Ted Kennedy. All of them are swine, and if you believe differently, then you're just a natural fool. Maybe 20 percent is the typical standard variation amongst mainstream politicians in bloodlust, in savvy, in the extent to which they hie to George Meany instead of General Motors. Enough to build a ziggurat of bodies from dead gooks, instead of a taller pyramid on which to plant their four-year throne and Five-Year Plans. When elections are tight, every vote counts, even the votes that end up chained shut in a ballot box drifting sullenly to the bottom of Lake Michigan.

Or on a bus driving down the ribbon of highway grown frayed and stained from soot and an industrial century of wind and fire. You get used to it quickly, taking the bus, if you've never had the chance to experience Automotive Consciousness. In the car, the world is a Panavision film splayed out ten inches from your nose. You control the vertical; you control the horizontal. The earth itself rumbles under your feet, and you eat up the miles so long as OPEC keeps the IV drip of black-tar gold running. To be without a motor vehicle at this late date means to be less than American, less than human. On the Greyhound, you're no more human than the bags in the undercarriage. Freight, humble and meek and smelling like last week's sweat. Greyhound never picks up enough speed for me; in my mind's eye I can see herds of the sleek gray whippets in V formations on either side of the bus, pacing it and then tearing ahead, howling deep into the night. Instead, we putter along from Podunk to Buttfunk, regurgitating passengers by the Dunkin' Donuts, by the gas station. Sometimes in front of the bus station, when the burg has sufficient tax base to rate two vending machines, a ladies' toilet (the men's are always broken), and a dirty pay phone.

All the towns we've passed are Potemkin villages of the worst sort. At least the clapboard and façades in Russia were designed to follow that great ruler and equestrienne, Catherine the Great. The church steeples and quaint little main streets, the burger joints and roller rinks, the satanic mills positioned right over brown rivers—they exist to fool the inhabitants. “Hootie hoo, you are too real Americans! There is your church; there is your steeple. Step out of line and we'll kill all the people!” And they vote for it. Every four years, the stupid sheep vote for it. And every fourteen miles the bus wheezes like a dying elephant and spills us out into one of them.

When the bus lurches to a stop again, I'm in St. Louis, Missouri, and I wonder how that happened. At the pace this bus has been moving, we should still be somewhere in Colorado. What happened to Salina, Topeka, and Kansas City? Have I slept through most of the trip, or have I had a bad reaction to the drugs? Could this be Jack Kirby's fault? A quick glance at my Moleskine notebook confirms that I've been jotting down observations, and although much of it is gibberish, I divine enough to know that we did indeed stop in those cities. Apparently, at one point, I wrote, “Kansas City is made of meat,” with no further frame of reference as to what that might mean. Why did I do this? I don't know. People are very strange. I check my kit bag and notice that both of my grapefruits are gone, as are both of my pints of bourbon. These facts seem to confirm that I have indeed been on the bus a while.

I need a drink, and there's a bar in a strip mall across the four-lane highway from the concrete slab they call the local bus depot. There's little traffic, so it's easy enough to pick my way across the first two lanes of the four laner and hop the crash barrier. The second two lanes are a Kafkaesque nightmare of squealing pig greed. Nobody stops. Instead, they speed up. A pickup truck veers right and sends up a wave of blackish mud and slush. From inside the truck, I hear Merle Haggard singing the praises of being from Muskogee. A woman screams from the passenger's side of an ass-beaten sedan, “You're poor!” and waves a fist from the end of an arm that looks more like a canned ham than a limb. I raise my fist and extend my middle finger in that time-honored salute. Finally, I just dive into the middle of the street, hands up and whirling, shouting, “Ho, ho! Man needs a drink here! Lemme pass, you swine!” and the night is filled with burning brake pads and honking horns and cries of bewildered rage. The sound is like a symphony, and it fills my heart with joy.

I don't catch the bar's name. Back where I'm from, that means it is either a place for fairies or criminals (or both; nobody is angrier and more efficient than a homosexual Mafia assassin, and I have known a few). Here, it means something else. There's no pool table, no jukebox, no pictures on the wall, and no dartboard. Instead, there is just a long black bar that looks like it's grown out from the Earth Herself, like a wave of obsidian that erupted from the asphalt of the strip mall and then at its apex just stopped. Elbow height. The place is near deserted as well, at least up front. I don't even catch the bartender at first; then I see her—a wide-eyed midget of a woman, an hourglass of a gal squashed flat except for a tower of bangs and high hair.

“Bourbon,” she says and is already pouring one.

“That's a good call,” I say. “Old Crow, even.”

“It's a gift,” she says. “That I can tell a man's predilection for this or that liquor, that is. The beverage itself, that'll be two dollars, friend.” Her voice isn't as Minnie Mousie high as I would have guessed it would be. It's deep, like her diaphragm is naturally low to the ground and thus her timbre is as well. I put down a fin, and she knows that I want another. She smiles. So do I.

“Good girl,” I say when the second glass appears. I glance down at it and feel a rush of wind on my forehead. I look up to a machete, a real Haitian baby splitter. It's a serious blade meant for serious business. The bartender is holding it with two hands, like someone might on the cover of one of those Robert E. Howard novels you can buy at the drugstore. Her face is twisted with hate.

“What did you call me, you goddamned son-of-a-bitch pedophile?” Pedophile comes out slow and deep, like tar spread along the road. I take a sip of my second Old Crow, even though I want to slam it back, hit the lip against the bar, and then grind it in her face. I want to do this so badly that for a moment I think I actually have. Maybe it's the remnants of the blotter acid or maybe it's just wish fulfillment. But I don't, because she's a lady. I can see it in her cheeks and eyes. Only ladies get that angry, only women who have not since the cradle let a man get the better of them can even generate that sort of simmering supernova of ape rage, without a hair out of place, without lips bared.

“Sorry, ma'am,” I say, keeping my voice steady. “I was just overcome by the quality of service here.” The blade quivers like it's going to drop. “You see, I've been on a bus for two days. At least, I think it's been two days. I'm not really sure, because things have gotten weird lately, including time. Strangeness happens to me a lot. But never mind that. I'm a reporter. A journalist. I need my medicine or else I start spouting all sorts of bizarre nonsense. Copyeditors hate me. So does everybody else. The ombudsman has a red phone on his desk just for me. When I do freelance writing work, I have to file my stories in pencil so that the editor can erase every fourth word before the gi—women in the typing pool get to it. They'd all quit or be rendered infertile and insane otherwise. So you've got to believe me, ma'am, when I tell you that I am so terribly, terribly sorry. And I am certainly no girl lover or boy lover, ma'am. In fact, just the other day I helped corner one of those rampaging mongoloids for the police. That was back home, back in Colorado. My dogs could smell the lustful desperation on him, and so could I. We can't have that nonsense infecting where we live, now can we? We must take care of our own backyards. The police thanked me, but it was the least I could do. We found him outside the soda shop, rubbing his hands and listening to sinister Negro music on a transistor radio. God only knows what he would have done had we let him live. Selah.”