Off the Road - 09

a jazz novel on a typewriter

Two

1

Mañana, a low lovely word that always comes tomorrow. Today it is tomorrow because we have driven for a little and hung out a great deal with both of us smoking and drinking cans of Coke until I realized when I woke up in a Motel Six in Erie Pennsylvania that we had to fly through the flyover country to get to Albuquerque on the date that Dean had promised. Mañana is every day. I felt like I had seen Dean a year ago when we woke up in the same bed. I remember him eating Doritos voraciously before he fell asleep while watching Stephen Colbert gruff and puff his way through the monologue that he was doing.

The first thing I said to him was from the night before: “Dean, why do you support who you support for president? According to the statistics, you should be a solid person on the Republican side.”

Dean was waking up and I think still thinking of other things as he took his boot and plunked it on the floor and slid his left foot in it. “You may have noticed that I have a lot of female friends.”

I nodded as nod got.

“When you have the desire to have female friends you go to where female friends happened to be congregating. And congregate they do. In droves. And where there is fresh meat that is where you hunt.”

“So, it’s just that? Just a calculation with perception?”

“When you congregate with the friends you want to have you have to listen to what they have to say. And if you have any brain power upstairs you then have to think about what they want and their priorities.”

“So, you change your mind?”

“When you want to get a female into bed one priority for them is not getting pregnant. It does not seem too unreasonable or unfashionable to want some peace of mind. It’s just rational and logical and it just makes sense. My vote is trivial compared to giving my female friends that piece of mind that they so want to have.”

And again, I realized that Dean was more pragmatic and more logical about his priorities than I was. Dean wanted the fruit of the forbidden tree but he was more logical in how he got it. He decided that less pain and less hardy to endure is the way to get the soul reward. By being an angel rather than a fiend is world would be rocked rather than lying in hell.

Again, I tell you that this is why I wanted to know Dean: because he thought things through and decided what he wanted and the best way of getting that. Whether goest thou? With Dean, it is the same place that most other men go but he is led from the head - though he takes a long the package for approval.

But mañana and heaven called us both and we got on the road with malice of forethought. I know I did not like to drive down the interstate but there was no way to avoid it. Benton Kentucky called our name rather Dean’s name with me in toe. And with mystical dance, I started up the car and we were on I-79 on the way to the only road that crosses the country: I-90.

We were freezing out through I-90 with the occasional smell of lilacs blossoming in the air and the cool breeze of a windless sky. The windows were open and it seemed that all was right with the world. I realized that his heart was freezing back but that he had put on his lousiest set of clothes. And this got me thinking until I just learned out: “Why if we are meeting one of your girlfriends did you put on such lousy clothes?”

Dean took a long slow inhale from his cigarette and said: “I’m going to change my clothes and we have a herd of riding to do until then.” This made too much sense and I should have thought of it myself but then I am hardly the brightest bulb in the basket. We drove through Ohio seeing the statues that the locals put up praising God. It seems to me that if God were as powerful as they made out he would not need any praise from such little ants as ourselves. But what do I know? It’s like the difference between the class clown and the class comedian. The clown shows up naked to graduation the comedian is the person who convinces the class clown to do it.

Then we stopped, at Dean’s request, at a Cracker Barrel because Burger King, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s just didn’t agree with his stomach. I realized that the only way that I would get him to pay their share was to force the issue in advance. I was hesitant but I managed to do just that. This meant that he had to go looking in the back for his wallet because of course, he didn’t take it unless he was forced to pay. He was stubborn like that. It was almost near Mason when he actually found it. It was a form of protest like the civilians at Kent State. How many more?

When we were seated I just let him talk about the hidden sonnets in Paradise Lost: how there were open sonnets that he showed but then there were hidden ones based on his own style which did not use ending rhymes. He took out his little book which was of Paradise Lost and he showed me how Milton hid sonnets and he peaked at his greatest mastery with four consecutive sonnets on the Tree of Good and Evil. Then he got up and went to the bathroom and came back sometime later. I didn’t think that he had done anything but go to the bathroom.

I just listened because I had never even thought about the hidden nature of words and the text that they conveyed. And the colored girls sing: “Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo.”

 And we were on our solidarity way with Providence there to guide.