Off the Road - 14

a jazz novel on a typewriter

6

The course we flew was to heaven but first, we sat our sales true to the tribulation of the unworthy. We were at the top of a hill that looked down over the city, spreading down around our feet as if time itself had stopped. It was not of the damned but of those who had fallen hard and just looked up to see the climb upward and seeing far they had crashed it their heart in their throat with crushing pulverization. It was like night with the low rolling thunderclouds reaching down to snuff out any hope of resistance. Yet down to it, we zoomed, Down Tom Sneed Blvd., straight towards the heart of town where the arches flew seeking heaven by any other name that anyone could purchase for a few dollars in their pocket. We kept driving though each meter cost me something of my sanity,  and I don’t believe in the in sanity clause.

And then the traffic disappeared and there was only an open road with white strips on the pavement to guide us to a blessed sleep if only we could find it.

“Dean, I think we should stop here for the night because I am too tired all leaving theft and right to get us farther, further, with a farewell still in our hand.”

“I’ve got no plans to hit the dull bars in any quarter in my pocket.” I took this as he didn’t want to dine merely dish out and drowse out. Because we were merely out in the closest thing to a desert and there wasn’t a light or car for 50 miles across the flats that wasn’t parked for the night, we went off to Industrial Avenue to seek the Super 8 which would shelter us for the night into mourning.

The one thing that I could say was that the city had plenty of trucks and therefore the spaces were wide enough almost for two of my cars. We took a few things in and found there was still one cheap room left though it was deep in the back.

“One of these days he seemed called Dr. Sacks will destroy this place with a secret herb which he is at this moment gathering up in his underground shack somewhere in America.” Then Dean looked around and was appalled that people slipped in such places every night every day for all their days to come. The first I wanted to take the other side but then I looked, and I mean really looked, and saw what he meant because it would be a dreary and drab existence if this were what you came back to after you had driven many miles to pay your freight. Even thinking of it cost me more sanity than I thought I had left, and I wished that I could the home even though home is where I’ll never be. The last time I went home I was still taking the bus and doing time at a minimum wage job in Nowheresville North da fuckin Kota, it being the only place that would accept me given my grades from high school were atrocious, awful, and just new good and all. This was before I moved to New York then moved back to Boston and of course before I had met anybody that I could call a “friend” for two straight days. All I did was work and then get fumingly drunk while not caring whether I attended any classes or studied or did homework or cared about anything. And in that light, I saw the motel around us in a different perspective, because I had lived like this for a long time, and you might say I still lived like this only one step up. Soon it would be mysterious night, and we were exhausted. We did not notice the long-sloped corridor nor the metal roof nor the tight fit nor the wretched paint nor any detail at all except perhaps the roses that melted into the iron bars. Nor did I hear the colored girls sing. “Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo.” Because I was too tired to listen to them. Perhaps they were there but I would know because there was something more important and that was to dream a deeper dream and awake to the daylight that I knew would be there if I heard it.

But then we got near dawn, and I was still exhausted. Dean looked at me closely and said: “ I think you need something much stronger than coffee.” And his face said that he meant much stronger than anything else that I had had.

Not being too right in my head I asked him what he meant and he took out a small bag with white clumpy rocks and said: “This will be the thing that will cure you, but you have to promise that you will not get hooked.” I still didn’t know what it was, but he took a rock and a different kind of pipe and lit underneath it with the rock in the center. And there was a beautiful Bloom that intoxicated me from the first and I took a draft from the pipe and suddenly I was completely abstractly conscious in a way that I had never been.

 Then we moved out of the room finding two dilapidated old men sleeping in front of doors into a room not knowing what was going on and really not being interested because we had a plan to get out of this place and find daylight wherever it could the found.

 Then we were back on the road paying tolls and whizzing by knowing that we had escaped the purgatorial realms of poverty and precious slumber.

 And with that, the review found a station with jazz on its menu and a song in its heart that formed the beat that was long forgotten not the beat of drums but the consciousness which raged inside my skull and drove me onwards. So, we went forth into the morning having left behind the rising stars.