Off the Road - 41

a jazz novel on a typewriter

6

There are two sides of San Francisco: The part towards the bay which is almost always sunny with ice, and the part towards the ocean whose early hours are coated with fog like whipped cream. Which side you live on determines for a much how you see the city as it changes from day to dusk and back again: in fact, can get on the beach and come out of the tunnel to an entirely different nature and at a certain point it becomes blasé and jejune. But in that nether region, almost defined by Haight Ashbury, one side sees the clouds and the other side sees the blue battling for supremacy in the cold steel sun.

USA is a slice of a continent, and both realized that the slice of the continent which both had a certain fondness for was closed to them for reasons that were too implicit, too explicit, too deplict to explain. And that meant that they did not stop to gather up words except to see the scene clearly. Their eyes lit at the same moment and they knew they had to get out of this place. Away from all of the tensions between cloud and clear, between the brine and the bay, between the surf and the substance.

Sal was lying down, and Faith had her hair on his lungs and her eyes on his skull. She was imitating her California accent which to any normal person would seem artificial but Sal did not hear what was fake about it .“You do know that your friends are psychopaths don’t you?” he wanted to make good in the limelight but it was clear that he did not have a clue, not even the ghost of a clue, not even the shape of the ghost of the clue.

“You’ll have to explain what you mean because I am not really familiar with the terms from psychology, sociology, or biology.”

She placed her hands and arms down on his chest and almost was explaining the words like a professor might: “Sociopaths are violent people whose amygdala is amgawdia. The center of the brain which ties together the hormones and the neurons does not work with them. Psychopaths have no empathy and may not be violent but think of other people as things to be played with and disposed of when they are not necessary. You find them in certain jobs like police officers, doctors, and if they can get the work, CEOs. There is also common among serial offenders, serial rapists, and serial anything else.” Then the lecturing tone disappeared: “How did you get mixed up with them in the first place? Or even if the second third or last place. To me, they wreak of nastiness, numbness, and noxiousness.”

“Dean is someone who I have hung out with. He sort of latched on to me from the beginning.”

“Why am I not surprised or even amazed, astonished, or agaped? Did it ever occur to you why he chose you out of all of the people he knew?”

“I wanted to be like him or to at least know him. He stuck his paws into me at the first possible moment. I wanted to be an author, and it was clear to me that Dean was the most absorbing, enticing, engrossing, engaging, and enthralling character who I had ever met.”

“If he is what you think of as a character then you would be writing about serial killers.”

At this point on a point, a light went on in Sal’s head casting around a bright searchlight in the gloom of his mind.

“I lived my life as a confused child, a confused teenager, and a confused college student. And played with toys until well after 16 and wet my bed at the same age. My only defense was that I was happy with anyone and everyone. At a certain point, I wanted to write about the confusion and thus pulled towards people who had no confusion, agitation, apprehension, or misgivings about what they had done. Dean was the paradigm the quintessential quintessence of all that I wanted to be.”

“I don’t think you wanted to be a psychopath.”

Sal thought for a while. “Actually, I probably did before. It is an alluring proposition to not feel anything for any actions that you commit but go on to do the next atrocity that comes into your mind the only caveat is that you must plan your atrocities, so no one knows that you were the one who instigated and abetted it.”

Suddenly room became large and black as if the fog had rolled in just before rolling out into the sea. And Faith looked at Sal through her narrowed eyes but did not say anything instead she put on a green dress and a pair of green sneakers that were wholly in their holy or was it the other way around?  It was at that point that Sal heard Miles stacked on top of “Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo.” in a chorus out of Horace and Horus.

And finally, he realized what it all meant.

“This is the plan we hit Dean for some money to buy a junker to cross the whole USA never stopping until we get to the other side.  By that point, you will have told me where you want me to drop you off and I will go back to Boston taking the scenic route.”

And that is what they did because Dean was willing to get rid of them partially because he didn’t like sharing Raw with anyone else and he had enough money to buy the better booze by wholesale and having Sal around was a nuisance and a drain on his bottle.

And so, they took on to the I-80  through Sacramento and into the nether world of Nevada through Reno looking for a place where their eyes would stretch endlessly for a new shade of blue in the miles that called them into a bright noon that looked like a mushroom cloud in foxtrot for 1000 miles down the road.