Randy pushed the accelerator to the floor; the broken speedometer stick pulsed like a faint heartbeat between the 0 and the 5 as Mona’s ’74 Dodge Dart sputtered and coughed its way onto Interstate 75. Cars blew past in blurs of bright colors; eighteen-wheelers leaned into Randy’s lane; billboards screamed to be noticed from above, provocative words on vivid photographs of exposed flesh, splashing water and ice cold beer.
Red letters on a yellow background caught Randy’s eye as the sign flickered to life in the darkening sky: liquor 4 less. At the next exit, he found himself pulling off of the raging interstate to go there. It was a strip mall of vices, Beer Barn on one end, Tobacco World on the other, a comic book store called Rick’s and the liquor store between them, one long cinderblock building painted alternating colors to differentiate between the stores.
Randy saw a parking space close to the liquor store entrance. As he turned into it, a tiny black man sprung up from the cinderblock wall and needlessly directed him to park. Randy cursed under his breath and did his best job of parking without assistance. The front tires of the Dart bounced roughly off of the parking bumper, ramming Randy into the steering wheel.
“Fucker!”
The black man did a little dance on the sidewalk in front of the car. He was wearing a navy blue t-shirt and black pants – both shiny with smears of oil, grease or maybe snot; he looked like a garbage bag come to life. In his fist he held a bottle inside a crumpled paper bag, the contents of which were the source of his happiness and his herky-jerky motions. He took a swig from the bottle and let out a refreshed “Ahhh!” Something about him reminded Randy of Black Lake Mobile Court.
The black man’s hips swayed of their own accord as the potion flowed down the path to his belly. He followed his hips, threw his arms out for balance, let his unkempt afro lead his head left then right then left again. His dance filled the double-rainbow shape in the windshield.
Randy said, “Shit!” and shook his head disapprovingly. He yanked at the door handle, forgetting that the driver’s side door didn’t open, then pulled himself smoothly out of the car through the window.
The black man laughed wickedly, kicked his knees up like a drum major, seized inward, elbows touching his waist, hands at this face. Noises escaped his mouth, but they made no sense. He nursed the bottle and continued chuckling all the while.
Randy stepped up onto the yellow parking bumper and sprung to the sidewalk, watching his feet, ignoring the man. But the man was right up on him, making noises, holding a peace sign to his lips and pretending to smoke. Randy assumed he was asking for a cigarette. As he turned into the liquor store, he spat out, “I don’t smoke!”
A tiny chime at the top of the doorframe announced his arrival inside the store. Cold air encased him. A tall brown man in a short sleeve dress shirt and tie stood behind the cash register waiting for him; an ancient woman in a bright orange sari sat behind him in a folding chair knitting. A glowing white caterpillar on the man’s upper lip matched the croissant of white hair around the bottom half of his head. It wiggled when he talked.
liquor store man, with a lilting accent: Hello, sir!
randy: You need to do something about the homeless man out there.
liquor store man: Excuse me, sir?
randy: The beggar, outside, he’s a pain in the ass.
liquor store man: Oh, I’m so sorry, sir. Mr. Clifton is usually very nice.
randy: Yeah, well…
liquor store man: I will call someone right away, sir.
He reached for the phone.
randy: –Wait a minute, did you say Clifton?
liquor store man: Excuse me, sir?
randy: His name is Clifton?
liquor store man: Yes, sir. Mr. Clifton is usually very—
randy: White?
liquor store man: Excuse me, sir?
randy: Clifton White? Is his name Clifton White?
liquor store man: I’m sorry, sir?
Pause.
randy: Never mind. Where’s the Southern Comfort?
liquor store man: Yes, sir!
The store owner’s eyes darted quickly over Randy from customer to customer, four other men of various ages, all white, in four different places around the store.
The old woman turned her gaze to meet Randy’s. Her eyes were golden, almost orange, like her sari, with the same flecks of jewels in them. Her lips curled up at the corners. Randy didn’t smile back, for fear she was trying to put a spell on him. He looked away.
The whiskies are in the third aisle, sir; the flavored whiskies are along the back wall, just past the wine.
Randy headed in that direction. The store owner called after him.
They’re alphabetically arranged!
Bollywood music broadcasted from a speaker hanging in the back corner. Overhead one-dimensional signs for different liquors swung from strings attached to the ceiling tiles.
There were two types of Southern Comfort on the shelves, regular and “special,” and four sizes of each type. Randy touched the neck of each bottle size and type at the front of the rows to see how they felt in his hand. He tried to imagine himself reaching across the car to quench his thirst as he drove on the interstate.
He had no idea how long a drive he was in for. The only other options were going back to Black Lake or going back to New York City, and he didn’t want to do either of those things, so San Francisco became the goal, if only because he’d never been there before – and also because Charles had told him San Francisco was the Land of Homos.
He pulled the second-to-largest bottle of regular Southern Comfort from the shelf and carried it to the front of the store, stopping on the way for a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola.
randy: Do you sell road maps?
liquor store man: Oh, no, sir. I am sorry. Try at Rick’s perhaps.
randy: What?
liquor store man: They may have road maps at Rick’s Comic Book Store next door, sir.
randy: Oh, okay. Thanks anyway.
Randy paid for his purchase, avoiding eye contact with the old woman whom he could feel staring at him. He left with a crisp brown bag in his hand, through the door, ching-ching.
Outside, the little black man was still there, fluttering about on the sidewalk like a winged creature, a mosquito, perhaps. He spotted Randy and fluttered toward him, holding a squashed three-quarter cigarette he’d found in the parking lot to his lips. As best as Randy could tell, the jumble of sounds coming out of the little man’s mouth was a request for a light. They did a dance in the sidewalk – one step this way, one step that way – as Randy tried to get around him. Randy screamed, “Fuck!” and pushed the man aside, then turned back to call him an asshole as he stepped off of the sidewalk.
His feet got confused between the sidewalk and the parking bumper; he lost his balance. The plastic bottle of Coke flew out of his hand and landed rolling across the parking lot like a red and black grenade. The Southern Comfort hit the pavement next to the Dart a split second before Randy’s hand came down on top of it. A thunderclap of pain shot up his arm as a piece of glass pierced the fleshy pad below his right thumb.
The black man was suddenly standing over Randy, grappling with his armpits, trying to pull him up but falling drunkenly onto him at the same time. He smelled like gin and pee and he sounded to be apologizing profusely.
Randy said, “What the fuck!”
The homeless man moaned, feeling the bigger weight of the situation.
Randy propelled himself upward, sent the little man flying backwards, twisting from the middle like a ferret, landing with a thud and a groan face first on the sidewalk. He was silent, immobilized for the moment.
Randy squeezed one hand to the other, clumsily climbed in through the car window, cranked the engine and started back out of the parking space. An arriving motorist honked a warning. Randy stopped where he was and sucked on his bleeding palm as the homeless man pulled himself up by the tire, bumper, then hood of the car parked in the next space. His nose was dripping thick red blood around his mouth and off his chin. He wailed like a baby. As his right hand steadied him on the car, his knees continued to buck intermittently. His left hand was balled into a fist, the index finger jutting out, pointing downward.
Randy raised himself up in his seat until his thighs touched the steering wheel and he could see that the homeless man was pointing down at his crumpled paper bag, on its side in the middle of a puddle of its contents.
“Stupid fucker.”
Randy pulled out of the parking spot, out of the parking lot, onto the frontage road, and stayed there, opting to travel alongside the interstate, where there were occasional lights and the traffic was going at a more manageable speed. As he went, he reached into the passenger side floorboard for a discarded unused fast food napkin his mother had thrown there and held it to his hand. It turned beet red. He tossed it into the back seat and reached for another, again and again, until the bleeding slowed.
Outside of the Gainesville City Limits, the frontage road disappeared and Randy was forced onto the interstate. He went as fast as he could, the accelerator touching the floor, but it wasn’t fast enough. He pictured himself from high overhead in Mona’s dried-up liver on wheels spattered with love bug mucous from bumper to bumper, dragging slowly along the interstate like a sickness.
Another sign caught his attention: lake city truck stop. He pulled into a huge parking lot where eighteen-wheelers lumbered prehistorically around pond-sized potholes reflecting halos of light from the tops of tall poles. On the opposite side of a concrete barrier were passenger cars, but Randy couldn’t figure out how to get over there, so he stopped beneath a light pole, put the car in park, held a fresh napkin to his hand, closed his eyes and let his head relax on the headrest.
A blaring horn startled Randy to attention. His windshield was full of red and amber lights. He grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, slammed both feet on the brake, braced himself for a jerking halt and crushing metal. But there was none of that; there was only Randy’s racing heart and cloudy head. He had fallen asleep and the eighteen-wheeler was just passing.
He turned the key in the ignition; the running engine screeched its ugly disapproval. Randy yanked his hurt hand back and examined it. The last napkin had stopped the bleeding and formed an artificial pinkish paper flesh.
He drove around the barrier at the frontage road and parked at the first lined parking space he came to, far from any other parked cars, carefully pulled himself out of the Dodge and walked timidly to the truck stop.
The glass double doors slid open automatically as he got to them, ushering Randy into a brightly lit world of country-and-western music, loud women, the smell of bacon and coffee, and dry, hot air blowing from overhead vents.
A woman hollered out, “Hiya, sweetcakes!” and somehow Randy knew she was talking to him. He stopped at the counter, smiled a faint response to the cashier’s beaming face beneath all that curly brown hair. Her gold plastic nametag flashed in the lights: vickie.
randy: Restrooms?
She shifted from one hip to the other.
vickie: Just past the rest’runt but before ya git to the shower sign!
randy: Thanks.
vickie: Oh, you’re welcome, sweetie pie!
A tall, pencil-thin waitress in a tight brown-and-yellow uniform and a pile of auburn hair with blond streaks (making it an almost literal beehive) tipped one of the two coffeepots she was holding Randy’s direction as he passed the restaurant. She was standing next to a booth table talking animatedly to a trucker in a leather vest. His long, wet, braided ponytail hung over the back of the bench behind him and twitched like a cat’s tail as he laughed at the waitress’ story. She didn’t stop telling it as she made her quick contact with Randy.
He returned a pitiful smile and continued on, thinking a shower might be a nice activity (picturing a situation more like a porn movie than the likely actual one). His fantasy was quickly dashed; there was a sign at the shower entrance that read truckers only.
The restroom was painted a thick, sickly gray-green color, slapped on over bricks, tiles, sheet metal. It smelled like pine cleaner, bleach, piss and shit in there, which reminded Randy of sex at the Adonis. Just inside the entrance was an upright scale where truckers got their weight and daily fortune for a quarter; over that hung a condom machine next to a designer replica cologne dispenser competing for another fifty cents.
Randy held his hands under running water until the bits of napkin came loose. A small white sign with red letters was affixed to the mirror with a graphic of hands and soap bubbles in one corner. employees must wash hands. Next to that, someone had added a black marker response on the mirror:
got tired of waiting for employees
washed my own goddam hands!
Randy squirted soap into his hands and washed the wound, which started bleeding again, but not a lot as it was more of a poke than a gash and not very deep. He pushed on the area feeling for the sting of lingering glass but felt none. The pain was dull like a bruise. He found his eyes in the mirror and in an imitation of Mona said, “You’ll live.”
Staring at himself he noticed that his face was a lighter shade of the sickly wall color. He knew he was haggard from the long day of travel – up at the crack of dawn in Hell’s Kitchen; subway to shuttle bus; bus to airport; plane to DC, another to Jacksonville, a third to Gainesville, drunk because he couldn’t imagine flying any other way; cab to the hospital, another to the trailerpark, and the Dodge Dart to here. All of this would be a lot for a healthy person, but it was clear in the mirror that Randy was not a healthy person, he was gray and dull and disintegrating. As he stared himself down, he was sure he could see what was going on inside Randy Reardon: the spreading virus.
Stomach muscles contracted sharply. Randy ran to an open stall, knelt down at the black toilet seat and puked for all he was worth, which wasn’t much, but whatever it was it came up stinging, left a raspy tickle in his throat. He heard approaching footsteps and felt embarrassed. He closed the stall door, flushed the toilet, dropped his pants and sat, just in time.
Someone entered, peed at the urinals, washed his hands, cranked out a length of paper towels, dried his hands, left.
The walls of Randy’s stall were covered with invitations (tap foot for bj), manifestos (i don’t give a shit, i took one!), and shithouse poems (here i sit all broken hearted, tried to shit but only farted). There were caveman-style drawings of massive penises being received by vaginas, mouths and rectums stretched impossibly wide to accommodate them. Randy took this to mean that all truck drivers were perverts, like him.
Across the back of the stall door bigger than anything else in thick blue letters, someone had scrawled i want a big black cock. Randy said, “Me, too. Me, too.” He thought of the big beautiful cock belonging to Poe Callahan, the black actor who mostly likely infected him with hiv. He asked for it. He should have known better. Poe fucked him three times, twice without a condom.
Randy’s dick got hard thinking about it. He worked up a mouthful of spit, drooled into his palm and jerked off while thinking back on beautiful Poe, and equally beautiful Rich White before him, now both dead. Just like he imagined he would be before too much longer.
When he felt himself close to orgasm, Randy opened his eyes and glanced down at his crotch. His hand was bleeding again and his dick was smeared with rusty redness. He gagged and shot his load into the toilet water then spent the next fifteen minutes waiting for the restroom to be empty long enough so that he could sneak out for wetted paper towels and return to the stall to clean himself up.
He wrapped toilet paper around his hand and headed back into the truck stop where he walked every aisle of the store section, ending up with a box of Band-aids, a bottle of Coke, a large bag of Frito’s, peanut m&m’s, Willy Wonka Gobstoppers, sour apple Jolly Ranchers, beef jerky, and a road atlas.
As Vickie rang up the items she glanced down curiously at the toilet paper around Randy’s hand.
vickie: Didja do that in tha john?
For a moment, Randy thought she could tell that he had just masturbated.
randy: What? –Oh! No. I did it…before.
vickie: It looks purty bad. Are you all right, sweetkins?
randy: It’s not that bad. That’s what the Band-aids are for.
vickie: Don’t ya want some alky-hall for it?
randy: Yeah, some Southern Comfort!
vickie: What? Oh!
She laughed.
You’re bein’ funny!
randy: No, I’m not, Vickie! I’m totally serious!
vickie, in a mock scolding voice: I was talkin’ ‘bout rubbin’ alky-hall.
randy: I know what you meant. But you can’t drink rubbing alcohol.
vickie: You’re bad! I swan!
She pulled a plastic bag out from under the counter.
–What’d ya do, anyway?
randy: Nothing. It’s a long story. I’d rather not go into it.
She mimed locking her lips and throwing away the key.
Randy spotted a display of small brown bottles in front of the cash register with tiny lights flashing on the sign over them. trucker zoom! He put a bottle on the counter.
And this.
vickie: Zat all?
randy: Yeah, that’s it.
She hit a key on the register and the total sale displayed in bright blue led numbers. Randy handed her his credit card and she swiped it through an electronic scanner built right into the side of the cash register. She smiled then rolled her eyes.
vickie: This stupid machine takes forever.
randy shrugged and smiled, then remembered something: Oh, and I need to get gas.
vickie: Well, you can pay at the pump, sweetie, or we’ll hafta start this transaction over from tha very beginnin’.
randy: Oh, really?
vickie: I’d hafta void this’un an’ call over a manager to git it approved, an’ we wouldn’t be able to do anything till that was done, and I think Walter’s on break. –Connie, is Walter on break right now?
randy suppressed annoyance: It’s fine.
vickie: You’ll pay at the pump, then?
randy: Yeah, okay.
The cash register hummed and whirred. Vickie’s impatience came out in a short, sharp sound of disgust. Randy gave her a look.
Is everything all right?
vickie: Oh, yeah. It ain’t you or nothin’. It’s this machine. We just got ‘em.
randy: Still workin’ out the bugs, huh?
vickie: I guess that’s whatchamacallit.
Randy chuckled despite himself.
If ya ask me, ever’thang’s just changin’ too quick.
randy: Mm.
She started bagging his purchase.
vickie: So. Where ya from, sweetness?
randy: New York City.
vickie: New York City!
She winked.
You’re sure a long way from home, ain’t ya?
randy: Well, I’m from here. From Florida. I was born here. But I’ve lived in New York for almost eleven years now, so it’s more like home.
vickie: Wow. I bet it’s cold up there.
randy: I live in Hell’s Kitchen.
He was enjoying himself. She gasped.
vickie: What’s that?
randy: It’s a neighborhood in Manhattan.
vickie: It sounds scary.
randy: It is…
The cash register spit out the receipt.
vickie: Finally!
She put the receipt on the counter and handed Randy a pen.
I got a sister up in tha State a’Maine. Sister-in-law, really. My brother’s been dead for years. Viet-nam took all a’tha good ones.
randy signed the receipt and handed it to her: That’s too bad.
vickie: We stay in touch as much as we can, bein’ that we’re so far away from each other. –I mean my sister-in-law, not my brother.
randy laughed: Right, ‘cause he’s really far away!
She peeled the receipt in two and gave Randy the yellow one, ignoring the joke.
vickie: And what are you doin’ all the way down here in Lake City from New York?
randy: My mother died.
vickie: Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.
randy: –I came to get her ashes, drive them to San Francisco and sprinkle ‘em over Alcatraz Island.
vickie: Tsk! That sounds beautiful! Well, ain’t you a good son! A real good son!
Randy waved as he exited through the automatic door. Outside he mimicked her.
randy: Well, ain’t you a real good son!
He got in the Dart and drove it to the island of gas pumps, inserted his credit card into the slot, took the fuel gun out of its holster and jabbed it into the car’s gas hole. As the numbers spun around marking gallons and dollars, Randy bandaged his hand then cleaned out the car. Bloody napkins were only a small part of the mess, and all but the napkins were the work of Mona Rose Reardon. Randy stuffed the garbage can with half-eaten food from McDonald’s, Jack in the Box and Burger King; unopened junk mail; ink pens and ruined, moist notepads stolen from her job at Keystone Inn. He even found a small plastic planter in the back floor, white-specked soil and a shriveled brown thing that had at one time been an English ivy, according to the sticker on the side of it.
He crammed his duffel bag into the back seat then opened the glove compartment with the intention of keeping the Band-aids there, but it was stuffed with more napkins, ketchups, notepads, and a carton of Vantage cigarettes, two packs shy of the whole thing. Randy pulled the cigarettes out to trash them, but the fuel gun clicked off and distracted him. He placed the carton in the passenger seat next to the box of ashes and said, “You might need these, Mona.”
After completing the transaction, Randy drove to the base of one of the towering light poles, took the atlas into his lap, opened to the map of the United States, with all the crisscrossing lines of interstates. He opened the Coke and Frito’s and snacked while considering his journey: I-75 would take him north to I-10, which would take him a long way to Los Angeles, where he would meet up with Interstate 5 and take that north the rest of the way to San Francisco. Looking at the map didn’t make it any clearer how long this trip would take – days? weeks? months? – but he was happy to have something like Trucker Zoom to help him along.
He fished the bottle out of the bag and studied it. Inside were capsules, half yellow/half black. On the label, each word of the small print took up a whole line: pseudoephedrine / clorpheniramine / dextromethorphan. In short, speed. Randy had never read the words before, but they sounded familiar; there was a period of about two months in New York City after a South American drug lord got busted and cocaine was hard to come by during which time Randy’s friend and boss Charles gave him a tiny brown bottle of crystal meth. He took it home and snorted the whole bottle in one evening and spent a long weekend cleaning his apartment to death, writing two unsolicited (and never published) articles for The Kitchen Sink, dancing non-stop for six hours at the Saint, and spending a record nine hours trolling from one Times Square porn theater to the next, hard as a rock, unable to get off.
He put out of his mind the horrible three-day flu-like hangover that resulted; he only thought that if this Trucker Zoom was anything like that crystal meth had been he would get all the way across the country without having to stop for anything but gasoline.
The label advised two Trucker Zooms every eight hours. Randy shook two capsules into his palm, took the cap off of the Coke bottle, cleaned it out with his tongue and his shirt, tugged the capsules apart, and poured the contents into the Coke cap. Thousands of tiny gray balls and white balls filled the cap to about the halfway mark, a few others disappeared into his lap.
A cool February breeze blew through the open windows and cooled the sweat beading on his forehead. Randy slid the key out of the ignition and jabbed the point of it into the Coke cap, breaking the little speedballs into something vaguely resembling powder. His saliva glands kicked in; his tongue thickened; his sinuses started running. Even his dick shifted.
The atlas became a tabletop propped on the dash, one edge along the steering wheel. Randy leaned forward, slid his wallet out of his back pocket, took a credit card and the crispest bill out, returned the wallet to his pocket. He tapped the contents of the cap onto the atlas cover; a few unsmashed speedballs rolled toward the windshield and disappeared in the space between glass and hard plastic. He chopped, chopped, chopped pretty unsuccessfully with the edge of the credit card then scraped the chunky powder into two lines across the faces of the happy travelers hanging out of a convertible on the shiny atlas cover. The ten-dollar bill was rolled into a tight cylinder; one end of it found its way to Randy’s nostril, the other end led him toward the drugs. But he couldn’t quite reach. He leaned a little farther and the horn honked. After slight repositioning, the end of the bill touched the atlas. Randy snorted a whole line into his right nostril.
The pain was immediate and severe, like a pipe cleaner with shards of glass glued to it reaming out his sinus cavity. He fell back screaming and stomping the floor; his fist came down on Mona in the box, denting the top. Fire tore through his skull, a razor-sharp slicing of mucous membrane and gelatinous gray matter. The tears that oozed from his eyes were thick and made his eyeballs burn. The wound on his hand throbbed along with his quickened heartbeat.
Headlights of an approaching car – possibly a police car – lit up Randy and pulled him out of his drama. Without giving the consequences proper consideration, he leaned quickly over the steering wheel with quivering hands and snorted the second line into his left nostril, most of it, as much as he could get in before the headlights hit him head-on, right between the eyes, blinded him with white heat. A desperate noise he didn’t initially recognize as his own curled out of him, turned the white light red, blood red. He kicked and flailed about in the Dodge Dart, lost the ten-dollar bill, caught the atlas in a hand and flung it once, twice, three times before it finally retreated to the back seat.
There was darkness. Just a glow from above but darkness in the car. Randy sat still, panting, crying miserably, willing himself to calm down. His nose dripped blood. He pitched his head back and pinched his nostrils, breathing noisily through his mouth. Blood ran down the back of his throat and made his say, “Yuck!” which sounded funny with his pinched nostrils. He laughed and said, “Trucker Zoom,” and it sounded funny, too. He said it again, and laughed some more, and repeated it.
Then he stopped. The nosebleed stopped. He sat up, alert, ready. He looked around to see if all systems were go. He fixed the smashed box of ashes the best he could, found the bottle of Trucker Zoom in the passenger seat, placed it on the dash between the salt and pepper. After a while, he located the keys between his legs. He started up the car, drove out of the parking lot, onto the frontage road, onto I-75.
The sign for Interstate 10 appeared almost immediately. Randy drove north into the highway spaghetti bowl and came out heading west, feeling good. A twist on the radio knob reminded him that he’d already tried that and the radio didn’t work. No problem. Without missing a beat, he made up a song:
I’m driving on the interstate,
My head is full of rocks;
My mother rides beside me
In a little donut box…
It continued, went on and on – a hundred verses, maybe, each one worse than the last. Randy didn’t care. He was on his way to San Francisco!
When he saw the sign that read welcome to alabama, he knew he would never see Florida again.