This long, rambling, confusing trip is supposed to be a series of journal entries.

It's constantly being reworked, and I think will some day be part of a much larger story.

 

 

I’ve determined that I am at least of some interest here. Here, like the now, in the arrogance of being alive, where you are and I am. But what about that interest? I can’t say that I know. Everyone has their parlor tricks and pickup lines: talents that rinse the lettuce of mediocrity. Besides knowing the capitol of Sri Lanka, I’m still looking for mine.

That delegates me as normal. One with fellow humans. That impression of disinterest that I deserve, though, doesn’t nearly outweigh the unconscionable level of ignorance pulling up next to me on the street everyday, my bank teller, my grocer, my friendly fucking neighborhood mailman. Finally, I determine I should spend a few days in the country.

 

I walk into the downwind, and the dust kicks up behind me. If this particular terrain had a name, it would be ‘sporadic gravel’. I’m positive, however, that there is no name for the hue that the sky is at its deepest spot, somewhere above the unimpressionable darkness, the last of the horizon blue of the space above Wyoming. Its breadth is parallel to the empty space below, about which I rant excessively in the paragraphs to come.

I had gotten off the bus at a leg stretching junction, nowhere, nostate, population nothing. There was a building with one door and one window, besides our own of the five minute, cigarette smoking variety, out of which terrible coffee was sold.

Wyoming’s Lonely Brew read the sign above the window. The fifty-something woman who sold the coffee, heaving her bulk to one end of the little building and back

                                cream?,

                                       sugar?,

gave me a grotesque wink after divulging that she lived only three miles south, in a trailer, on her lonesome. I nodded, looking her in the eyes, and then turned away. The sun was to my left and I started walking.

You’d think someone would have said something; noticed me walking into the obvious wilderness, and remembered the back of my head from seat 3B, maybe I gave them a smoke in Chicago, or a quarter for a soda machine in Pittsburgh. I was almost surprised when the hulking Greyhound rumbled to life and road again. I turned to watch it haul to the horizon and realized I was a lot farther from the little coffee building than I thought I’d walked.

If Rhonda (I’ve taken the liberty of naming fifty-something coffee woman since our ambiguous encounter) saw me wandering slowly in the direction of nothing, I’m sure she’d have no further compulsion for me to visit her trailer. In fact, I bet she put that extra padlock on the door tonight. Inquiries of corpulent women are a metaphor for my life.

 

There were plants and birds and rocks and things. I don’t know what I expected to find out here. I have peanut butter and jelly to last me a week, but I’m afraid I’ll be bored senseless before a week might pass. Not that sense had any major part in the decision to make a quick pilgrimage to the heart of our country’s vast plateau of drab.

I suppose I’ll save myself with a first page drug reference, as I decide to smoke a joint, one with nature, one with the space and space of nobody. And then it suddenly overwhelmed me. The thought of insignificance in an ocean of empty land. Mine were shoes that stepped across these rocks, possibly for the first time ever. I had never seen a sky so big as the sky in nowhere, Wyoming. Yearning momentarily for the sight of a fellow human, silly me, I thought of Rhonda, and maybe crashing at her place for the night. It brought a mordant twitchy smile to my face, thinking of making it with fifty-something coffee woman from nowhere. I would stick to my P B and J.

 

My watch reads seven of seven. The joint had gotten me jittery but curious, so I continued my path northward. Light winds were busy picking up my footprints and spreading them over the expanse of my personal (selfish?) enlightenment. I noticed after a while, clench and shudder, that the horizon east was getting slightly darker by the minute.

To my right, I was stunned to see a massive tree jutting straight out of (          ), and I headed in the direction. It was the first tree I had seen in my meandering and hoped against hope, with a smile, for an apple. The tree, I decided, while fruitless and lonely, would be my camp for the night. It was a large oak, having no business growing on this plane, directionless and positively waterless. /my new spread of branches provides me with a nice inverted arch upon which I sit and stare out. I’ve frequently gotten down out of my perch and wandered in varying directions away from the oak, but eventually always turned around.

On the farthest of these walks outward, I sat down, facing west. The sun was great and yellow, turning my face the color of fire and orange juice.

I thought of Rhonda again. I wondered if she had closed down the shop for the night. She’d known that I wasn’t getting back on the bus. Granted, she used that opportunity for a proposition, which in all other cases (and lower age brackets) I would find flattering, an obligatory invitation that wasn’t to be missed. Had I exuded pretensions to that effect during our encounter? Especially keeping in mind the obvious obtrusive nature the woman brought to sight. I don’t remember saying anything to her, let alone something provocative to the point of Rhonda, fifty-something proprietor of Wyoming’s Lonely Brew, complete fucking stranger to me, gladly offering up the location of her home, where she slept. Complete with a wink from her pudgy eyelids. It stuck in my head, the silly image of Rhonda, left eye perpetually closed. It honestly creeped me out.

It’s getting dark. Sitting out there for nearly an hour made my butt coarsely numb. I eventually headed back to my tree, climbed it, and lounged across an outcropping branch. And here I am, staring into the wilderness focusing on everything, and nothing at all. It’s almost too dark to write without my flashlight.

 

The waitress at the Sunnyside Cafeteria told me, ‘When it’s clear and you can see the sun, it’s because it’s too cold for the air to hold any moisture.’ I pause for reflection and empathy for the citizens of this great metropolis.

The wind bit at my knuckles and the tips of my ears, giving me a pseudo ice cream headache, forcing me to seek refuge. The waterfront was bustling and dirtier than I had anticipated. Mid-country men screamed get out with their eyes. Lake Superior lived up to its name. I tried in vain to see the opposite shore.

I was quick to learn that the depot where the bus drops off its unsuspecting cargo isn’t one of the nicest neighborhoods in the greater Chicago area. In fact, blatantly far from it. A well meaning old man with dread locks approached me and asked, quite politely, if I’d like to buy some heroin. He unfolded his hand, producing a small bag with anysubstance that could have been baby powder. I told him no, thank you, gave him a cigarette for his courtesy, and continued east to find a sandwich.

It’s half good to be back to the perpendicular numbered-named streets, American city. I needed more human companionship, more than Rhonda or my lately overactive imagination could ever produce.

It was a long walk to the waterfront, following highway 19. I was certain I’d get stopped and questioned by my share of curious highway patrolmen, but I reached and again departed the waterfront without incident.

 I found the Sunnyside Cafeteria on my way back west. The cute waitress, always a staple in good restaurant business, enticed my patronage, and I pointed to this booth by the window so I could watch the traffic go by and write this undisturbed by the remaining customers, who had already eyed me warily.

Sandy, introduced to me by her nametag, led me to the booth, mumbling something about the weather, humanity’s common bond in small talk. I sat, cracked a smile with chapped lips, and Sandy winked at me, much like Rhonda had, and it stifled my breath.

 

My face hurts from the wind. Maybe still from the fall from the oak tree in the middle of nowhere. Which I’ve been working up to writing about. I’ve been here in the Sunnyside for almost too long. It would have far exceeded too long an hour ago had Sandy not taken a liking to me. Her frequent cigarette breaks are spent opposite me in the booth, silent except for my scrawling away about the Chicago streets outside the window. I felt mild embarrassment when I realized she was reading while I wrote, about her winking and all. When I stop writing, as if to think about what’s to come next, she pounds the butt of her cigarette into the ashtray between us, smiles at my wide eyes, gets up, and walks away. Her smile is right: I watch her go every time she gets up.

 

Sandy’s apartment is on the fifth floor of dilapidation heights, Illinois, apartments her and her fellow east-enders inhabit. In fashionable contrast to the peeling hallways and well graffitied stairwells we traversed in order to reach her front door, the living room we stepped into was colorful and more than a little ethereally decorated. Candles and Tapestries adorned rampantly, a sheik disco love hut motif if there ever was one. But Sandy came across as more down to earth than her décor. She lit a cigarette like a debutante, the kind that know people are watching them, so they light their cigarettes a certain way. She tossed the pack to me, and crossed the room to open her balcony door. The skyline behind her was rapidly turning to dusk, reminding me of Wyoming once again.

But, surely as redundancy takes hold, Chicago is making me forget all about the outback of middle America. The inback. Hell, the outfront.

Sandy made salad with her hair up in a rag and her bare arms through a tank top. I’m enjoying smoking cigarettes and looking at the city streets below from her balcony. I can see rooftops and patches of urban blacktop for four or five blocks to the south. It’s very surreal and Sandy smells like sage.

 

I’m thinking about swearing off wilderness in general, if not for something like Sandy, for what happened in Wyoming when I woke up. I was on the tree, and I was rubbing my face. The creases and canyons of the bark had left imprints on my cheek, and my jaw was sore from the headlights to the immediate west of me. They shone quite clear, piercing in fact, within the Wyoming blackness. It could have been a rumbling engine I heard, but through the breeze I’m sure my imagination could have picked out anything my head could have come up with at the moment, including that car. It seemed to be idling just one or two hundred yards away.

I decide it’s best to try not to be seen by these gun toting country bumpkins out for a joyride in the middle of a starless Wyoming night, straight out of left brain, somewhere between fear and humor. I crept up the tree a little more, into the sparse foliage and stared at those lights forever, thinking about the paranoia behind me. Someone must have seen me walking. Watched me, lying in the bushes somewhere with high powered binoculars and walkie-talkies. Picking off tourists like ocelots astray from the greyhound bus. And maybe that’s where Rhonda fit in.

It all made sense in my head, there in the tree: Rhonda tries to entice average men, like myself, reveals the location of her trailer, obviously an effort to confuse these poor men on their quests for personal enlightenment to Wyoming. And if they don’t bite, and head north, brazenly the wrong direction, Rhonda follows them until—

The car lurched forward, its headlights momentarily tipping to the sky and lighting up my face. The tires or the wind squealed and the engine roared as it worked its internal combustion magic. It was heading straight for my tree. I remember thinking it must be an old ’64 or ’65 Chevy, the way the headlights looked, and then I remember thinking that I didn’t know a damn thing about cars, let alone what ’64 or ’65 Chevy headlights looked like. I was scared shitless.

I edged quite nervously up the tree. It got brighter and brighter, came closer and closer, and I braced myself for what I was sure would be the end of me. One of the many times.

The car slammed into the tree at damn sure near a hundred, and the tree swooned forward violently, effectively knocking me off my branch. I had landed disoriented, not to mention on my head. Rolling away from the tree when I hit the ground, I managed to stumble to my feet after several revolutions. I ran like a concussion, staggering this way and that, off balance; I felt like a chicken running to save its head. When I turned to look over my shoulder, my feet tangled beneath me which sent me to the ground again, but once up on my elbows I saw there was no car, and realized that the car had, in fact, not produced a single sound when it barreled into the tree.

Sometimes I feel like I need to do things, in the way that whackos and schizos think people tell them to do all the terrible things they might do. Maybe it’s the same way teenage horror movie victims feel compelled to reenter the house they just escaped from, ‘just to make sure it’s dead.’

I climbed back up the tree, which, upon inspection, hadn’t suffered a single scratch in the collision that shook me from its arms.

I contemplated smoking another joint to calm my nerves, but instead trembled and thought about smoking it some other time, maybe once I had reached civilization. I found I was tired enough from hitting my head on the ground. From a medical perspective, I foolishly fell asleep.

 

It was a strange set off circumstances that led me to staying at Sandy’s apartment the very day we met. That part about the joint reminded me of Sandy scooting into the booth next to me, the first time she hadn’t sat across from me, and asking if I had anything to smoke besides cigarettes. Of course, in an ongoing personal mission to bring the people of the world together in herbal harmony, I gladly nodded.

A quarter hour after her shift had ended Sandy and I were in the alley way between Sunnyside Avenue and North Drake, smoking the joint I hadn’t smoked after my fall. Sandy told me I looked like heck. She puckered her lips, pursing them against the joint, crossing her eyes to look at the glowing tip, and sucking tunefully.

            ‘Heck?’ I replied. I took the joint from her fingers. ‘I don’t sleep well on busses.’

            ‘Oh?’ She took it back. ‘Coming or going?’ She asked, eyeing me. I had the slightest idea that she was asking if I was planning to stay in Chicago. I didn’t want to tell her yet, that it depended on her.

            ‘Coming, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Provided I might find a place to crash.’ Her gaze shifted quickly from the tip of the joint to my eyes and back again. She rolled the joint between two fingers and looked at it in a queer way, as if studying. It made me grin for some reason, and I had to look at the ground, when I saw, and immediately admired, her shoes. In between aficionado and picky fashion senses lies my taste in shoes, and hers garnered my praises.

            ‘I dig your shoes.’

She looked genuinely flattered in what I was babbling about. When she smiled at me, my confidence felt a surge of girl, besides the fact that all women, no matter how interested they look, are eventually going to ask you what you do for a living, and in that department I am wholeheartedly screwed.

But before Sandy had an opportunity to be disappointed in my two year tenure at Jack and Shit, Inc., she had kissed me on the cheek, and bolted out of the alley, running north up Drake Avenue. I sat bewildered on the lid of a trash can for far too long, turning out to be only seconds, and then it dawned on me to follow her. Wasn’t it what she wanted? Expected? Isn’t it a consummate fact that the act of pursuit is half the fun of thinking you’re in love? Or is it being the one pursued?

 

So there I was, running into the wind in Chicago, effectively tugging on Superman’s cape, chasing a girl who’d stolen my eyes at the Sunnyside Cafeteria. She was fucking fast.

I barely made out her laugh as she took off down Lebeau and back onto Sunnyside. I was cramping up. My ribs flared up with such pain there on Sunnyside, that I stopped and doubled over, wondering what an ass I must be making of myself to the people around me, wondering what I was doing, chasing a girl down the streets of a city that didn’t know me. Wondering what the hell I was going to do next.

I sat with my back against Perry’s Downtown Bagels, and I thought about what a stupid name Sunnyside Avenue was, and frowned on my misfortune in the windy city.

            ‘Shit!’ I said quite loudly, startling Sandy. She was standing over me. I recognized her shoes on a classic backdrop of broken sidewalk squares. I looked up at her squinting and breathing in unison.

I smiled at her and she smiled back.

            ‘What’ve you got to say for yourself?’ she asked, hands on her knees, her face in front of mine. We were both panting from the run.

            ‘Yer damn fast,’ I said. ‘For a smoker.’

My mouth gaped. She’d winked at me again.

I smiled at her again, as warmly as I knew how, and she grabbed my wrists to help me up. We walked slowly away from the sunset, sharing cigarettes and talking about how things should be in a world as normal as ours. She asked me where I had come from, and I told her about my journey to the center of Wyoming, where I’d found nothing, and decided to come to Chicago to pick up chicks. She laughed.

            ‘Come with me to my place,’ she said. ‘I’ll make you dinner.’

 

“I don’t know if this girl’s fleece was too tight or what, maybe cutting off the circulation to her stupid gland or something, but this one time, some preppy bitch tried to start some shit with Sandy, and Sandy straight up broke her nose, serious, We were sitting at the park by Riverdale’s and this chick comes up and says some shit to Sandy about hearing something, this and that, and how Sandy was running with us kids of a ‘disreputable nature’, basically talking shit like she seen the movie, I could tell Sandy was gonna do something, y’know, her eyes get all squinty and her mouth hangs open, You can tell cos she holds her breath, too, So Sandy lunges forward, right? N’ I try to grab her, but she pulls away from me and got up off the bench, I looked at Tiggler, Sandy’s boyfriend at the time, He just sat there and watched, I think he thought it was funny, Anyway, Sandy gets up, rears back, and absolutely belts this girl, POW! right in the face, There’s blood pouring out between the chick’s fingers, and she’s holding her nose making this squealing sound like ‘Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee!’ she’s all bleeding and blabbering and Sandy just sits right back down again, doesn’t say a thing, The girl was like, ‘You brope my nove! You fupping bipff! You brope my fupping nove!’ her hair was all getting stuck in the blood on her fingers, ha! dude, it was a trip, So she eventually wandered away all crying, but, shit, she should’ve known not to go there of all places and start spouting off at the mouth, man, she’s lucky that Kimmy and Blake and the boys hadn’t been there, She would’ve been straight jumped and made lumpy, Every girl for a block would’ve caught a knuckle on the bitch, They would have straight fucked her up, broken a lot more than her nose, that’s for damn sure, But instead she steps up when it’s just me and Tiggs and Sandy at the park by Riverdale’s, She’s luckier than she knows, man, She’s lucky I didn’t jump in there, Right Sandy? Right girl? Ha!”

 

So I had a crush on this girl once, and she ended up breaking my little soul, sending me head over heart into adolescent therapy, for kids, where a wonderful young lady the ripe credential age of twenty one tried her darndest to relate to what I was gushing on about.

I, on the other hand, thrilled her to death, a real case work. I exaggerated, to say the least, about situations, relations and drug innuendos: teenage life in the big city: screws and booze. I filled her scribblings with a sense of urgency and her head with doctorly thoughts.

She didn’t know it but I looked at her like one of my own, only dumb; the dark side of teenage life. She was my patient, and I was patronizing her with every word that came out of my mouth. I became more resentful with every lie she swallowed and pretended to empathize with. It was pathetic.

Session after session, she became younger and younger, and then I was telling fairy tales to a five year old, who, in turn, held the power to my everlasting demeanor. After a while I realized it was queerly therapeutic, telling her stories of what imaginary delinquency I had gotten myself into. And my bi-weekly ramblings eventually made their way to my compulsionary disorder. Such a disease was sure to win me the little white slip of my destiny, the holy prescription.

My therapist was a monkey. She jumped and danced like an idiot to the tune of my fiction. I told her I had cold sweats, and I was afraid of department stores and their clerks, I got goose bumps when I thought of talking to girls other than my mother, I had to wash my hands three and a half times before I can leave a bathroom, and then only when the door opens outward.

Betty Lou, my personal super hero, Ms. Therapy herself, caught my pop fly and smiled, and said to me, with her prescription, ‘I understand your pain, little buddy. And this is my gift to you.’

I was given Clomipramine and Sertraline, though not at the same time, and it brightened my mornings to the point of gleeful toleration. (Both, I observed some time later, were psychoactive drugs with cartoons for commercials: bouncing, happy balls with smiling faces, offering reassuring slogans like, ‘We here at Prozac know what it feels like to be shy..’ or, ‘Millions of Americans are taking Paxil and feeling the result of being mentally healthy.’)

Now, I wasn’t prone to compulsionary fits of hand washing, and I’d talked to hundreds of girls in ways of which my mother certainly wouldn’t approve. But Betty Lou kept the metal goodness, the personality candy rolling in. Before I knew it, my cereal was three little blue pills and a glass of random alcohol.

The drugs dried out my mouth, gave me an eerie feeling down my spine whenever I would yawn, and destroyed any semblance of social confidence I’d once had. I knew, as I had somehow always known, that the remainder of the population was still several iQ points lower than the company I saw myself keeping for the long run, which the Sertraline magnified. This in turn heightened my expectations for the words that came out of anyone’s mouth, which lent itself to my extreme detest for the great majority of the human population.

I became a teenage shut in, books and blue pills, and I mentally spat upon the inferior minded. Babbling Tv game shows would make me sick with disdain, their mild mannered everyday contestants sicker still. John Smith, from Bumfuck, Idaho, would have me screaming at the television: ‘Pick a J you dumb sonuvabitch! Pick a fucking J!’

Sincere shrink sessions, years later, would expose my acute agoraphobia, both hatred and fear of the common stupid man, teeth, hair, brains, and all. I felt as if I’d been forsaken by the intellectual beings who had dumped me on an intellectually barren planet.

Then again, I do whine an awful lot.

Once again, I hear the country beckoning me.

 

Word for word. Jenny went on about how bloody a little prune that preppy girl would be if she, jenny, hadn’t been in a good mood, hadn’t just eaten, hadn’t just gotten her nails done, hadn’t just hadn’t just hadn’t just

Sandy’s “friends” are a fun bunch. The east end’s own little time murdering family, waiting to happen and ready to hang out on a moments notice. But not to take these troopers lightly. “The boys”, I’ve come to understand, are actually the girls, named so for their affinity for the fairer, albeit same, sex. Gender bending, and appropriately named.

I had been in Chicago for three days, and Sandy and I had become close. It was a shame that I had to leave so soon.

My last afternoon with Sandy was spent in an upper east side coffee hole, where I smoked rolled cigarettes and wished that Sandy and I could get a word in alone. I wanted to tell her to come with me, but not in the dubious crowd we were in. Her eyes told me she knew what I wanted to ask, and, please, not to.

Jenny seemed like a sweet enough girl, underneath her passive aggressive shell of a mouth. She was not one of the boys, hence her boyfriend, hulking and dumb, was introduced to me as “Yup.” I hated him immediately.

Yup had a face straight from the bowels of the face factory, in the sense that he looked like eighty percent of the people I walked by everyday. He also had a disturbingly bright orange hat, backwards, on his head.

Perhaps Jenny had interested my interest in Sandy, which might explain the ferocity with which Yup came onto me, like we were long lost best friends. ‘We was gunna hang out n’ shit.’ I meekly shrunk away from every word he said to me. The fat bastard even winked at me, as if I didn’t really need that last little shred of comfort.

Sandy looked at me apologetically.

Jenny asked me where I had come from.

It was time to make my uncomfortable move.

I told them about what had happened in Wyoming. I wasn’t interrupted for what must have been fifteen minutes.

I told them about Rhonda, leaving out the wink and its pretenses. I went on about wandering, the Wyoming nothingness, and the tree, then the car in the middle of the night, and the fall on my head.

Finally, about how I’d woken up the next morning not only sans car, but, oddly enough, also sans tree. It had downright disappeared, and enticed me to take my leave of Wyoming days earlier than planning.

With a resounding, “This is fucked up!” to match my headache, I packed my backpack, whose contents I found strewn around me for a quarter mile, though it had been zipped shut and beneath my head both times I had fallen asleep.

I told them about getting back to Wyoming’s Lonely Brew… Well, at least the place it had stood the day before. I shivered there on a cold Wyoming morning and waited for the bus with a twitching gaze.

 

I waited for them to laugh, but they didn’t. There were raised eyebrows and expressions of obvious disbelief, but not from Sandy. She looked at me, and a smirk blossomed in the corner of her mouth.

            ‘Um, I’ll go get some more coffee for everybody,’ Jenny said and stood up.

            ‘Yup,’ added Yup.

 

Jenny and I drove quietly towards the greyhound station of south Chicago. I had a deep feeling in my gut about her. It made my stomach turn warm like a heavy liquor.

I was sorry to have to leave, but Sandy knew, as I did, Chicago wasn’t my style.