American Nightmare

by john duncan, summer, 1998

 

Roadtrip Chapter 1: Mountain Madness

 

               What sinister eyes flared behind this man’s mirrored glasses?

               “Citizenship?...Where ya’ headed?...What for?!...How much money do you have?!...”

               Were these interrogations or exclamations?  The lord of the customs booth seemed very excited to be grilling us.  And then the eternal question:

               “What do you do?”

               And then one to throw us off track, question our integrity, unsettle our confidence:

               “Are you flying there (to Vegas)?”

               “Uh, no.  No.  We’re, uh, driving,” I said, hiding a humoured confusion.  They don’t like to see that.  Humour is for smartasses.  Confusion is for drug addicts.  Both deserve to be pulled over for inspection.  We were attempting for neither category.  We didn’t crack.

              

               And with a “good luck” we were sent on our way into the adventure playground of the United States of America.  Our shoulders relaxed, dropping from tense positions around our ears.  We had avoided talk of any and all hallucinogens, as well as their location in the vehicle, evading even the thought of search and seizure; but with our only obstacle, the CanAm border, behind us, it was smooth driving in the American Southwest (insert prosaic, though relevant cliche “or so we thought” here).  Richard and I free to roam in the Intrepid, an obvious borrowed-from-the-parents car, though our only version at hand of the Merry Pranksters’ ‘Furthur.’

               With very little to ooh and ahh at until one reaches the mountains, we raged forward.  Good times were had, and good time was made, stopping only for gas, and once to satiate hunger.  We had waltzed into an all night diner, the first signs of fatigue materializing.  I was carrying a large screwdriver.  Richard held the car stereo and a steak knife.  We had plans to fix the cassette player, which had become damaged within the first two hours on the road, chewing up a bad Colin James/Tom Cochrane mix.  The locals saw it differently.  They wouldn’t let us sit down to eat.  We had places to be anyway.

               Morning revealed our fattening insomnolence.  Richard, the resident sufferer of ADD, yanked out a large prescription bottle of Ritalin.

               “It’ll keep you alert in these desperate times,” he spoke through a widening grin, soon to ebb to default as he fell into a slumber after his breakfast of Wild Turkey.

               The travel bug was kicking in.  With the radio cranked, and howling along to “My Heart Will Go On,” no one could pass the Intrepid flying down  I-80; not even the bike gang, who were put in their place, as I pushed 110.  That’s miles; once we reached the U.S. our minds converted to Imperial.

               Toronto to Colorado in less than 24 hours.  The only radio channel, a children’s bible sing-along.  We drove into tempest up in the mountains, a literal blizzard.  Later, at elevation down to 8000 feet, the Intrepid began to wax trepidation.  We couldn’t breach 50 mph.  We pulled off at the exit to Bakersville, a town not on the map, and apparently not within the bounds of physical reality either.  Just an extra name marked on a sign.

               “No use in me being sober,” declared Richard.  (Giving up for the evening, there was no use in me being awake.  I nodded off waiting for the salvation of morning).

              

               “John – Gettup!”  He was into the Wild Turkey and becoming apocalyptic: “Wut the hellzh goin’ on?”

               It was well after midnight now, and it had started to snow.  There was a bright light in the rearview, but it just sat there.  Then it moved, and a large purple towtruck pulled up aside us.  Saved!  But again, it just sat there.  Someone pressed up against its tinted windows, watching us. 

And then it drove off, stopping further down the cutoff ramp under a lamp pole.  Someone ran out of the car, another person close behind, dragging him/her back.  There was talking, loud talking.  There was even louder yelling.  There was a struggle with a large object.  And then the person was pulled back into the truck and it drove off.  It may have been an abduction/rape/murder.  We may have witnessed the onset of a homicide.

               We got out of there.

               At the next exit we called AAA for some road service.

               “What if it’s the same guy?”

               And the fear went up a step, as Richard withdrew a large hunting knife, and handed me a jackknife, and continued to devise a plan if the situation got any more extreme.

               “We’ll only kill someone if we have to.”

               And we were serious.

 

               It was a different tow truck, and our problem was the altitude – not a big deal at all.  We continued on, the great descent only a few miles on from where we had originally stopped for the night, and after reaching about 3000 feet, speed returned to normal.  The radio suddenly blared back into effect, having scanned futilely for a nonexistent channel for the last few hours.

               We couldn’t call the police.  Not just for the obvious reason that the police were probably in on it (paranoia stemmed from a bad Kurt Russell movie), but that there we were in the middle of a blizzard somewhere in the Colorado Rockies at 3 in the morning; two Canadian boys in mommy’s car, beer cans all over the floor, with a half-empty bottle of whiskey, a big knife, a bottle of pills next to the driver seat, and a quarter sheet of LSD in the trunk.

               We could only carry on.  (There was no time for retrospect).

               So as I wrote to Paul in a postcard later on: “No problems there.”

                                                                                                                                       john