EXPRESSWAY
by jemiah jefferson, © 1997
This is the sequel to Aneurysm,
and this is inspired by a combination of things -- Beck's album
Odelay!, a road trip that didn't quite work out a few
summers back, and a few other things. Two songs combine for the title
-- "Expressway to Yr Skull" by Sonic Youth, and "Novocane" by Beck --
most specifically the line
Novacaine... hit the road ... expressway... explode
I'm really in the shit now, I'm thinking.
I'm on the concrete slab under the flyover that leads to L.A., head between my knees, finally done with crying. I always heard the expression "to cry your eyes out", but I felt like I'd done it and my eyes were just two empty drying pools. Plus it's dark out and the cars rushing by in front of me are wavering and strange and I feel like I have a wicked hangover.
Running away has never been so traumatic before. Before, I would grab some clean panties and a spare T-shirt, my drugs, and a couple of tapes, stash them in my army bag, and happily take the long bus to Corrinne's house, where there was always cookies or something else her grandmother had made, drinks, and someone who didn't think I was a freak. If I went to Corrinne's now and told her I'd slept with -- no, fucked -- my sister's boyfriend, even Coco would tell me I was an idiot. There's nowhere to go. And I don't even have any clean underwear.
So I'm going to have to go back to that asswipe place and deal with more of the grey hideous boredom and hatred and hypocrisy, eat the crow my sister dishes out until my tongue bleeds and watch my mom sleepwalk her way through job-drink-sleep-job. I can't do it. That's why I've been underneath the damn highway all evening.
I can't deal with all of this right now, and I have a dollar in change in my pocket, so I get up and dust off and walk up the highway until I get to the Perkin's that's up there. Sometimes there's other punks there, and they can spot me a cigarette or maybe give me a couch to sleep on for a couple of nights until I feel up to going back. Gods, punks are the only real people...
I wander into the Perkin's, scanning the booths for some punks I might recognize. I don't see any punks, but my sister's boyfriend is sitting in the back with his older brother, Big Ross. Big Ross is smoking and talking in big gestures about something, and Allie is hanging his head like he's being lectured. I just stand there frozen for a long time, fight or flight pumping through my body, but then Allie looks up and sees me and a little tiny smile touches the corner of his mouth.
I come over and sit in the booth next to him.
"Hey, it's Leah's little sister!" Big Ross says. "Jody, right?"
I look at Allie and say right.
"You been crying or something?" Big Ross hands me a cigarette. He smokes Chesterfield Kings. Big Ross is a hella cool guy. He once gave me a ride home in his truck from the Cure show at the Coliseum when my ride flaked out on me; we listened to Skynryd and he told me all about his pit bull, Rhino. I had called for Allie, but he was passed out drunk on homemmade cherry brandy at the time.
"I ran away," I reply matter-of-factly.
He lights my cigarette with a dented Playboy Zippo. "Let me buy you something to eat."
He buys me a grilled cheese sandwich and large fries. "You shouldn't get into the habit of running away," Big Ross says, leaning back into the booth and gazing into space like a teacher locking into the zone. "I ran away so much, my folks stopped caring and wouldn't let me back into the house, no way, no how. Allie here can tell you. I mean, it was a little different then... I was kind of a greaser hoodlum with a kind of Jack Kerouac fetish going on... and in the end, it was just stupid. I ended up having to move in with Jennie, my first wife, and getting a job pumping gas. Pumping fuckin' gas."
"Why'd you let Allie move in with you when he ran off, then?" I ask, stuffing fries three at a time into my mouth.
"Well, I ended up having to shack up with a woman... didn't want to do that to poor Allie. He was in school, workin', he's an all right kid." Big Ross tousles Allie's hair. His massive scarred drywall-frosted hands dwarf Allie's delicate skull. He must outweigh his younger brother by a hundred pounds and I'd only seen him standing up once, but he looked kind of like the statue of Paul Bunyan that I'd seen on a tourist postcard once. I think they have different dads -- they have different last names. Neither of them discuss their mother.
Big Ross keeps talking about making something of himself, moving from gas pumping to house painting to construction, money, benefits, blah blah blah. Allie keeps on dropping his head to his chest and rubbing his hands over the sides of his face like he's trying to keep himself awake, and I just gobble on, making affirmative noises when I have the feeling I'm supposed to. Reason why I like Big Ross so much -- he knows he's boring you and talking shit, but he doesn't take it hard when he knows you're not paying attention. His truck is decorated with porno centerfolds, fuzzy dice, Chesterfield Kings butts, and a holographic Dark Side of the Moon bumper sticker.
Finally he throws some money on the table, and we shuffle out. "Be a good girl, Jody, huh?" Big Ross says, patting me roughly on the shoulder.
"Yeah, uh huh," I say sarcastically. "Sure, dude."
He walks one way and Allie and I walk the other. "Did you tell him?" I ask.
"No. He wouldn't get it." We're standing under a streetlight and amber coats his dark- blond sideburns with gold. He picked up the sideburn habit from Big Ross, and on anybody else, I would have found them totally fucking ridiculous; but on him they looked OK. "Do you hate me now?"
"Why? Why would I?"
"Well, now your sister's going to be a megabitch to you and make your life a living hell. You ran away, right?" He's really bugged by this. He's twisting his hands inside the pockets of his dirty corduroys.
"Fuck it," I shrug, trying to look nonchalant, but I know it doesn't work. I shake my head, smile, and punch him lightly in the shoulder. "It's not your fault. I didn't exactly try to scrape you off."
He still isn't smiling, but he seems closer. "Do you want a ride somewhere?"
"Huh? I thought your car was -- "
"No, it's fixed, that why I was here with B.R. He lent me the money to get it fixed." And there in the Perkin's parking lot stands Allie's Trans Am, one of the first, all its 70's macho ridiculous in the wake of the broken pavement and crap of the 80's. It was originally some sort of bronze color, but now it looks like dried blood, all crumbly and brown. "Let's just go drive for a while," I say. "I can't decide if I want to go home yet."
It's as though we transferred my secret closet to this coffin on wheels; we're smoking joints, listening to his Public Enemy/Cramps mix tape, there's a whole world just beyond but only the two of us in here. My God he's beautiful. I never admitted it to myself or felt it clearly but it's right here, now, I'm sitting next to a minor demigod, and if I stretch my mind a little bit, I can still smell myself on his body. He seems to know that I want to go in the direction away from home rather than towards, but nowhere in particular.
As if by unspoken signal, he parks someplace out in the boonies, off the parking driveway of some superhick's property, and reaches over for me with his hands and his mouth. I feel like I'm going to eat him alive. We're fumbling with my shirt and pushing the seat back and he's already pressed up against me, hard as a stone.
We fuck in his seat, then in mine, me on top, then him. I don't know which I like better -- him on top is glorious because he rises up like a cobra and I can watch his skinny white stomach working and it's so hot, and me on top is perfect control and perfect depth and the blood rushes away from my head and makes me dizzy. He's a little orgasm machine. He buys and sells. He's wonderful.
Afterwards we're just lying there, stroking each other's necks and looking at the dim and sad constellations out the front window. "Sick of this place," he murmurs. "Sick of my job. Can't be this shitty everywhere."
"I wonder," I reply.
"You wanna run away?" he says.
"Sure," I say.
"Let's go," he decides.
"Where are we going?"
"I dunno. North. East. Through the country. Let's at least get the hell away from southern California."
I sit up a little, pushing my hair back. "Well I'd need to get some shit."
"We can get it. Are your mom and sister asleep by now?"
"It's three in the morning? Hell, yeah, they're asleep."
"Let's go," he says again.
We stop at Allie's first because it's closer, and he brings out a large duffle bag full of clothes and another smaller bag of tapes, toothpaste, pipes, and the like. He also brings an extra blanket.
Everything is dark out front of my house, but Allie parks a little ways away and I approach it from the back, where my room is. Thank God I know how to silently break into my own house -- I've done it millions of times and neither of them heard or suspected a thing. Mom sleeps the sleep of the dead, and my sister wears earplugs so that if I'm playing music it won't keep her awake.
I buzz through my room and take my usual essentials, adding my colored pencils and a drawing pad and my teddy bear, Laurence. I get scared that I'm taking too long figuring out which tapes I want to bring, so I just pick up the plastic bag they're in and wind the sharp handles of it around my wrist.
I get back into the car, and we just drive. North and east.
We, very stoned, sleep when morning comes. Together under two blankets we do just fine. Our bodies fit together beautifully -- I'm not as skinny as he is, but I'm close; my rib cage rests nicely against the soft part of his belly.
I dream all night about the different ways that I could tell him. All the possibilites swim through my head, everything from a big Partridge Family "I think I love you" to "I would catch a bullet in my teeth for you". Most of the time his reaction is "God, what a dork, get out of the car," and my dream screeches away with a cloud of dust. Every time this happens in the dream, I wake up for a second, fidget blindly fetuslike against Allie, and fall asleep again immediately, as if I'm on a deadline.
When I finally wake up, Allie's sitting up smoking a cigarette. "Morning, beautiful girl," he says to me. "Wanna go for a drive?"
It's one o'clock in the afternoon, Nevada, hot and dun and bright. The first order of business is to find a KwikEMart or Sev to get some food and caffeine. Allie gets gas and I pick out chocolate donuts, corn chips, Pixy Stix, bean dip, some drinking water, and two Mountain Dew slurpees. Allie sees what I bought and laughs. "God,we're gonna be bouncing off the walls on sugar."
"It's my money."
He's staring at the boxes of cheap hair dye in the hair-dye-and-shoe-polish aisle. "How would I look with black hair?" he muses.
"Like a dork," is my immediate response, then I give him a decent eyeball and reconsider. "Well, maybe it would be kind of cool."
"Would I look like Lux Interior?"
"After a couple of fortys, maybe. Will I look like Debbie Harry if I go blonde?"
He laughs again. "It's my money. Let's become each other."
Allie has a couple of pairs of sunglasses hidden all over his car, because he keeps losing them and buying new ones, only to locate the lost ones months later underneath the front seat. We're hanging out in this car with Ray Ban knockoffs on our faces, elbows out the window, listening to Iggy Pop, and flying on sugar and Drum cigarettes rolled with weed.
We're kind of meandering. Allie got sick of the freeway a bunch of miles back, and we've been coasting along this desert road for a long time with no impression of where we're going.
At a gas station in the middle of nowhere, we crowd into a ladies' toilet and slop the dye shit on our heads. His dusty hair is inky blue-black almost immediately, but it takes about an hour before my brownish scrubby whorls attain blondeness. I can't decide who looks weirder -- Allie with his eyebrows looking strangely pale under the shiny leechlike tangles, or me finding out that I'm more tan than I wanted to be. If it wasn't for the combined stench of hick female parts and peroxide, I'm sure we'd have been making out in there. Instead we gas up again and keep driving.
We find an orchard with an irrigation rig and stop for a while, get drizzled by the automated irrigator, eat chips and dip, and congratulate each other. In the course of this, IT comes out -- too late now. "God, Allie, I'm so into you."
He screws up his face and begins singing the Frampton tune "I'm in You." "Fine!" I snap, the blood rushing to my face, "fuck you too."
"I don't mean it. Jody, c'mon. I'm glad you like me back." He puts his arm around me and kisses me. "You are so one of the best friends I've ever had. I'm just such a fuckup."
"Well, so am I," I say.
"I'm a creep. Please don't hold it against me."
"Well, I'm here, ain't I?"
A single bird wheels overhead. It's a hawk. I decide that I want to drop acid.
We stop again, for something to eat, and for some fruits that I can eat while I'm tripping -- I can't stand eating artificial or processed or cooked food when I'm frying, but I'm always hungry because my body burns energy at many times its normal rate. Allie agrees to sober up so that he can look after me and not drive us off a cliff into the Grand Canyon or something.
With the fall of evening comes a blissful coolness. The sun is a while from setting, but the increasingly bleak desert blasts it into a smear of red, gold, and lilac. I have my drawing pad out and I try my best to record the colors, the shapes of the clouds, but they keep changing as I draw and I add layer after layer of colored pencil to the paper.
In the process I just start talking and tell Allie basically everything about my life, from mom and dad's divorce, my dog who dad took with him, school, going to see X when I was thirteen and what it changed, blah blah blah. He's listening, bobbing his head sort of in time with the music and sort of in time to my talking. Usually I would never blabber on like this -- and he already knows pretty much all of it already, between my sister and I, but he seems to appreciate the effort. Every once in a while he reaches over and tousles my hair, which is really starting to get crispy in the desert air.
In the distance, I see something rising out of a misty tide of light -- thousands of crystal pink glowing strands that reach from the air to the ground, but don't quite reach it; they hang suspended there like psychadelic carnation blossoms exploding into the night. I shout out "Hot damn! What the fuck is that?"
"It's Reno," says Allie with a kind of derisive confusion.
"Reno? But it's like... it's like beautiful."
"It's fucking pink christmas lights."
"No way, man. Could we see them close up?"
"Jody, I fucking hate Reno. My mom used to drag me here when I was a kid and she wanted to play the slot machines. It's a pit."
"I'm tripping balls, Albert Daley... Humor me a little, already?"
"OK, you owe me one."
"We can do whatever you want next time. You're driving, asshole."
"True," he says.
Up close it's the strangest sight. I've never been to Reno or Vegas or any of those other shitty resort towns with all the neon; I've been to L.A. once, and it was nothing like this. Imagine a circus with flaming monkeys jumping through hoops made of electric sparks and everything else just pales to black in comparison. I don't even want to get out of the car, we just join the phalanx of slow-moving cars down the main drag, idiots from hickvilles gawping at the rows of hookers and insane Tesla coil hotels.
Allie is yawning.
"You ever dosed in Reno?" I ask him.
"Shit, no, I was like seven years old."
I shrug. "It's cool. Try it sometime."
"I'll live vicariously through your experience, if you don't mind. Now can we get back to something vaguely sane? Your pupils look like basketballs."
I don't doubt it. I sit back in the seat and keep my eyes closed, letting my body tell me instead that he's gunned that shitty Trans Am engine and is getting us out of city limits at top speed, a left turn, a right turn, and then a smooth long straightaway that means the highway. I-80, by default.
"Was I being a cunt?" I ask cautiously.
"No, you're tripping... it's OK. I know what it's like. I like to indulge you. You've gotten the broom handle all your life, I might as well not be like them." He takes a random exit off I-80; I can tell he chose it at random because he made a thrilling three-lane change and left a trail of sparks behind us as we mounted the offramp.
In Nevada-almost-Utah, when there's no one else around, the middle of nowhere is a beautiful place. We're beyond foliage now, beyond houses, beyond much other than the occasional trailer, creek, or rock formation. The moon is rising now that it's dark, splashing blue light over everything.
We stop and spread the blankets in the back. Allie is naked, and I'm taking off my clothes slowly and dazedly like I've been knocked over the head. I've been peaking for a long time and I think I might be ready to come down; the dial on the car's clock means nothing to me now. He goes slowly, letting me find my own pace and what I want to do, and for some reason I'm remembering our first time with crystal clarity now -- the way he rolled his eyes back while we humped with clothes on, the smooth knobby contours of his penis in my mouth, the unsubtle stabbing of his fingers inside me.
Allie and I make love until I'm definitely almost down. The sky is growing saintly, the color of the periwinkle crayon before you use it. I lie on my belly, playing with the tiny balls of lint on the surface of the blanket. Allie looks tired. Dark shadows surround his eyes like icon haloes, the darkness pinching the bridge of his nose together. In the moonlight, with his hair black, I almost don't recognize him; he looks about ten years older, careworn. "Can I ask you a personal question?" I ask him.
"Course," he replies.
"Why did you go out with my sister?"
He rolls his eyes and sighs. "I don't know," he says. "I was in love. I mean, you know how it goes. She was everything I wanted and couldn't have. You know, beautiful and smart and --"
"Neither!" I reply.
"She is beautiful, Jode," he says imploringly. "Even you can see that. She looks like that chick from Say Anything."
"G-ross," I scoff. "Is she's so beautiful and smart, then why are you here with me?"
"You even need to ask that question?" He rolled his eyes again. "Well, you're real. You're beautiful and smart and you're real. You're like the first person ever that didn't think I was a shitheel."
"That's 'cause I'm a dumb kid," I say.
"Oh, shut up with that shit, little Deborah Harry." Allie sits up, suddenly all energy again. He reaches into the glove compartment and grabs a Vivarin out of the Sucrets box he keeps them in, washes it down with some lukewarm drinking water. "Shit, let's keep going! I'm not sleepy... let's go to Chicago."
He puts on just his pants, his skinny torso rimed with goosepimples, and guns the Trans Am back onto the highway. I'm left scrambling for my t-shirt and shorts in the back of the car as he slams the pedal to the metal until we're coasting along at 85.
We cross the Utah state line in fifteen minutes.
I have no idea where the hell we are, except Utah, on I-80. Maybe I'm not coming down -- there doesn't seem to be anything in existence except for the dull black ribbon of the road emerging from a sea of royal purple. Allie's breathing picks up a notch or two; he must be nearly about to explode from caffeine. I don't know what I'm going to do with him or without him -- just the sight of him turns me on so much that I want to run away.
There's not another car on the road now, wherever we are. There's still no land, only sky, with a few slaty fistfulls of mountain floating in it like icebergs. Everything is turning red now. We must be in hell. We're driving into hell. Red and orange and the mountains seem to be moving and breathing and coming closer.
"Um..." My voice sounds like a dying child's. "I think I have to get out of the car."
"OK," Allie says, his voice strangely passive and calm considering the drugs.
He comes to a stop and we get out. There is land, but I can't see it. The ground is the same color as the sky. Paler oranges and lavenders and blue overhead and underfoot. An artist's rendering. "Trippy," I say.
"This is the Bonneville Salt Flats," he explains. "They have drag races here. Perfectly flat. It's all salt."
"Was it done on purpose?" I ask.
Allie smiles a little and rubs his fist against the top of my head, and I know I've said something stupid and I'm talking like a tripper, but he doesn't care. I kiss his chin. "Don't leave me," I say.
"I won't," he replies. "No matter what."
When we get sick of looking, the sun is coming up and everything is turning a uniform milky grey, the car won't turn over. Allie's tan face goes very pale. "Fuuuuuck," he says under his breath.
"What is it?"
"It was doing this before. Those assholes told me it was fixed. It's supposed to be a brand-new starter. Those assholes!"
It just won't turn over, won't start. I think I have to pee.
Nobody's on the road at this hour.
Allie lays his head on the steering wheel and sits very still. I wonder if he's crying, but I don't dare poke him to look. There's nothing that finding out will solve.
Out there, as the sun goes higher, the sky and the land separate into blue and white like they're supposed to.
BUY EXPRESSWAY! only two bucks! Help me please!