I-State Lines

Chapter One

Alex says it’s me, but it’s him. It’s got to be him, because this kind of weird griff never happens when I’m alone.

Take our bus ride from Kansas City. It should have been the snooziest cruise in the universe to get to Alex’s uncle’s farm in Liberty. But no, everybody else on the bus makes it to Iowa except us. Why? Alex.

He blames me because I’m the one who bought Old Man Ching’s Dodge, but the Lancer only died because it got sick of Alex bitching about it. It had been running ragged ever since the New Mexico border, and on this melt-lead morning in K.C. it coughs like an old man who’s just sucked his last cig and goes four paws to the sky.

Alex swears and pumps the gas but it’s adiosed, and he barely gets us off the I-State. We coast down the offramp, make it through the intersection just as the light turns red and roll to a stop in front of a boarded-up supermarket.

Alex turns off the ignition and stares straight ahead. Then he sits back and closes his eyes, and I can see he’s making an effort, but he can’t quite damp it down.

He slams his big fist on the dash and flames up on me, the usual about what a nuclear waste catfish the Lancer is, the ugliest car ever, what a piece of crap, and now we’re stuck, bruddah, really stuck.

When Alex gets bent he slips into his Hawaiian Pidgin. That usually makes me forget his bad mood, but I've heard this speech so many times it takes all my willpower not to launch a major loco-moco myself.

It's bake-brain city, not a puff of breeze, and we just sit there sweating because we both know this could be the end. We’re only heading to New York because his cousin Tita just got married and he hadn't seen her in years. Even so, it was damn depressing to end it in K.C., after all the work we’ve put in the Lancer and all the big plans we’ve made.

I let Alex click down and after a while we get out, pop the hood and try the easy fixes—wiggle the sparkplug wires, clean the distributor, tap on the carb, chant the humba-humba—but nothing helps. There isn't much to say; we both know the engine needs major surgery, and that we don't have the gitas to pay for it.

We’re breathing the hot-oil smell of the engine, listening to it creak as it cools, when Alex comes up with a plan. One of his father's uncles runs a farm in Iowa; Alex is obligated to visit at some point during our cross-country gig, so we might as well do it now. We can call L.A. and borrow enough money from our parents to fix the Lancer. Alex figures we can probably get close to their farm by bus.

By some miracle the dangling pay phone in front of the dead market works—our cell phone never made it out of Las Vegas alive, thanks to Alex accidentally crunching it with the Lancer—and I get the bus info and directions to the station. I'm worried about leaving our Cruiser in this hollowed-out block, but we’ve got no choice. I leave a note on the windshield that says, "Car dead, be back soon to fix, please don't tow," and hope that helps. Then we grab our day packs and the presents for his cousin Tita, lock the car, and head for the bus station.

It takes a half-hour to walk there and my T-shirt is soaked and sticking to my back in the first two minutes. Alex peels off his tanktop, the holey white one with the green Hawaiian elf sleeping under a rainbow, and lopes along like la-di-da. The heat doesn't bother him, but I'm dying. I can't complain, of course, because it's all my fault we bought the Lancer.

SoCal is plenty hot, I mean it’s all womp-rat desert, but this is the first time I’ve felt a sidewalk putting out invisible steam, and seen the slices of sky between old bars and closed-up shops filled with a bright, light-hot blue like in a dream. They either forgot to plant any trees, or chopped them all down, because there’s nothing to shade the liquor store steps or the alleyways. In this heat, the only smells are piss and Pine-Sol.

The station hasn't been painted since I was born and it's in the part of downtown that hit its last three-pointer forty years ago. We push through the glass doors into the cool air inside and look around.

It’s big and old and almost empty, like a set for some black-and-white movie about small-time grifters who drink gin. It smells like Ms. Minny’s classroom back in the third grade after Tony Nguyen rorked up his tuna surprise, and it looks like the circus is leaving town because everybody’s got that tired look of old crumpled newspapers.

We walk up to the grubby window, buy our tickets from a sweaty fat woman and then go over to the greasy pay phones so Alex can tell his relatives we're coming in.

He hangs up, nods once to let me know everything is set, and then we take a seat against the back wall. The only other people waiting in the rows of cracked pink plastic chairs are a shaved-head grunt who looks like he just got out of boot camp and an old man who isn't sweating, even though he's wearing a black suit and one of those hats with fishing flies stuck in the band. I try to shift my feet, but the floor is so sticky from spilled sodas I can barely peel my shoes off the old linoleum.

Alex is like a pressure cooker with the heat turned off. He’s got this just-sucked-kumquat face and even though he’s just sitting there with his hundred-pushups-a-day arms folded, his eyes have this metal-sparky look that I try to stay away from. He told me he hated having to ride the bus in Honolulu, but the main reason he’s torqued is the Lancer. He always thought my obsession with getting it from Old Man Ching was loopy; he wanted a Mustang or a Malibu. But he went along with me and now we’re stuck, bruddah, really stuck.

Just to get away from his mood I go over to the drinking fountain but the dribble coming out is warm and tastes almost as bad as L.A. water. While I’m avoiding Alex, an old lady with her hair tied up in a tight little grey bun sits down next to a cute Af-Am mother with a sleepy baby and starts talking with the mom.

I’m starting to think about everything in the Lancer that I wish I'd stuffed into my pack when our bus finally comes in. After spocking the station I'm surprised the bus is clean and air conditioned and smells better than the inside of a cattle-car 737 at L.A. Airport You know what I mean, that air coming out of those nozzles feels cool, but it’s already been breathed ten times that day.

These I-State buses are pretty much King Tut; Alex lets me have the window seat, and I figure we're as high as an 18-wheeler cab. The seats are big, not like those crappy ones on airplanes, so you can actually stretch out. You get a real window, too, not some little plexiglas salad plate that's so scratched you can’t even see outside.

Once we sit down I figure I’m safe, Alex can stew all he wants, but we’re on our way again whether he likes it or not.

I should know better, but then Alex looks so damned innocent that he fools even me. Grandmas see his easy white-teeth grin and they can’t resist saying, “What a nice young man!” Then he slouches a little so he doesn’t seem too cocky and looks down with this aw-shucks expression. It’s enough to make you puke, and it happens all the time. Sometimes you want to punch him, but then getting turned into a pretzel just isn’t worth it.

The old lady with the grey-hair bun boards and sure enough, she takes one look at Alex and smiles. He’s got this serious look, but he beams back at her with his patented beachboy grin and even though I feel like gagging I’m relieved his mood is more beach and less volcano.

The real freeze is that these same ladies take one look at me and figure I’m some kind of bargain-rack hoodlum. Me, who’s actually the nice one. It’s not that I got my father’s skin; Alex gets even darker than me once he’s been in the sun a few days. Sure, I got stuck with the wimpy body while he got the athletic-god bod, but not everyone who’s short and skinny looks like a grifter. I guess it’s my face, but I don’t know why. My father’s no movie star, but everyone thinks he’s a nice guy, so why me, Lord? Alex says I have this wise-ass expression even when I’m asleep, but that’s a hack. I’m probably smiling because I’m having a good dream.

Meanwhile, Alex drops chaos wherever he goes and in between explosions grandmas smile at him and give me the glare-dagger. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. It could be a lot worse. Alex could be an enemy instead of my friend.

An overweight blind woman in a bright orange muu-muu gets on board after the grandma. She's holding a white cane and towing a scarecrow boy about nine with hair like old hay and a stained T-shirt that’s two sizes too small. The woman pauses and seems to scan the bus with her looking-at- you-but-not-looking-at-you eyes.

She says, "Driver, can you help me to a seat?" The driver's watery-blue bug eyes worry me a little because he looks like he’s living on No-Doz, but he guides her to one of the first rows of seats and the kid jumps in by the window.

We pull out of the station and I start to relax. Maybe this detour will work out okay. We'll be in Iowa by early evening, maybe it won't be hellhole hot anymore, and at least we'll be staying on a real farm.

We get on I-State 35 north and after awhile we've left the city behind and it's open country again. I lean my seat back and watch the hot faded blue-jeans sky outside creep past the deep blue seat cover in front of me, and my eyes start sagging closed. I've almost dozed off when the blind lady's raspy voice jerks me awake. "Joseph, you got your butt planted on a seat?"

The thatch-haired kid is wandering up the aisle, staring at people, and he doesn't answer. I turn around and see the brat make a weird face at the old man in the black suit and fishing hat. Then he leans over the young mother in the next row and pokes her baby in the cheek. The baby starts crying its guts out and the brat makes another gargoyle face. Meanwhile, the blind lady goes right on jawjacking with some woman across from her. I hear the woman ask the blind lady something and she tells her, "How'd I get a kid? Just like you did—in the dark," and then she cackles this wheezy laugh that's right out of a bad horror movie.

The kid sprints down the aisle from the back of the bus to where we’re sitting. He doesn't say anything to Alex, but he asks the old lady behind us if he can have some gum. The lady says, "I'm sorry, dear, I don't have any gum." The kid brays like a hyena on laughing gas and I'm starting to get a little irritated.

People are muttering about the brat and I glance over at Alex. His arms are still folded, but there’s this metallic shine in his eyes that makes me knot up inside.

The blind hag finally notices her kid’s still M.I.A. because she interrupts her motormouthing long enough to call out, “Joseph, get your butt down here,” and then goes right on cackling and jawing.

The brat ignores her and asks the young Army grunt in front of us if he can play his radio. The guy says it's not allowed and the kid swears at him and starts jumping up and down, making ickabod grunts and hoots.

The brat is running past us when Alex's hand whips out like a bolt of thick brown lightning and grabs his arm. "Hey, you hear your mawdah?" he says to the brat, holding him. Alex is toggled to Pidgin, a bad sign. He nods toward the front of the bus and tells the kid, "Go sit down."

The kid struggles to free himself and says, "Let go, asshole."

This is just about the most unwise word selection possible and Alex squeezes the brat's upper arm really tight. The kid squawks and the mother finally pays some attention to him. She spins around and shouts, "Joseph? What's wrong?"

The kid cranks up some fake whimpering and cries, "This asshole's hurting me!"

Alex didn't really hurt the brat, but he lets go and says, "I was only trying to help you with your brat, lady!"

The blind hag hefts herself out of her seat and starts creeping back toward us, bracing herself on the seat backs. In a voice mean enough to melt lead she screams, "Which son of a bitch said that?"

The kid runs to his mom and shoves his crying up to full RPM. She's looking around with her cat's-eye marble eyes, everyone’s quiet, and I feel the bottom fall out of my stomach.

“Somebody should control the boy,” the old lady behind us says angrily. I see the driver's black Ray-Ban shades in the rear view mirror and the bus nearly swerves off the road.

"Driver, call the cops," she yells. "Some son of a bitch hurt my Joseph."

“Alright, everybody back to your seats,” the driver shouts, and he romps so hard on the brakes the blind hag is almost tossed on her face.

The driver yanks the bus onto the gravel shoulder, and everyone is staring and talking. The driver takes off his shades and says, "Lady, go back to your seat." His voice is as tired as his bulging eyes, but he's not taking any griff on his bus.

"Some son of a bitch hurt my boy," the hag says in a blowtorch wheeze.

"Lady, get back to your seat or I'll put you off the bus," the driver says, and the hag and her brat grudgingly shuffle to their seats.

The driver walks back to us and his eyes are almost out of his skull. "Okay, guys, off my bus."

"The kid was—" I say, but he cuts me off and says, "You want me to call the cops?"

I shake my head and stand up. Alex is sitting like a statue, staring a hole in the seat back in front of him.

"The young man is right," the old lady behind us tells the driver. "That child should have been controlled.” In a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, she snaps out, “Some people aren't fit to be parents."

The blind hag hears this and jerks to her feet. "You saying a blind woman shouldn't be a parent? Some people!"

The old woman stands up and her gray bun is quivering in a full meltdown. "I didn't say a blind person shouldn't be a parent. I said you aren't a fit parent. Letting your child run wild like that! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!"

"Lady—" the blind hag is breathing heavily from the effort of standing up, and tugging at the front of her orange muu-muu— "Fuck off." Then she says to the rest of the bus, "Does anybody else think blind people shouldn’t have kids?"

"Being blind's got nothing to do with it," yells the old man in the black suit. "You shouldn't let your kid run all over the place."

Right away, both the young mother and the grunt on leave say something in favor of the old man.

The blind lady listens to this in disbelief and then shouts, "Joseph, stay away from these assholes. They think they're better than blind people."

"Lady, give it a break," the old guy in the back shouts in disgust. The brat is silent and keeps his eyes on the floor.

"Okay, folks, that's enough," the driver yells. "Lady," he says to the blind woman, "sit down or you can get off, too."

She sits down with a grunt and mumbles like a sailor on a Tequila drunk about getting off just to get away from these assholes.

Alex finally stands up and we follow the driver to the front.

"It's not right, putting them off the bus," the old woman behind us says, and her voice is vibrating with old-time-religion outrage. The driver just puts on his Ray-Bans and follows us through the doors and down onto the asphalt edge of the parking lot.

He opens the luggage compartment, we pull out our bags and he locks the steel door again. "Sorry boys," he says. "It's the rules." He tears two coupons off a book and hands them to us. "You can get a refund with these."

He climbs back on the bus and the door whooshes closed. The passengers give us thumbs-up signs through the windows and then the bus rumbles off, leaving us alongside the corn fields, our hair whipping in the tailwind of the cars and big-rigs blasting by.

I want to say something booga-booga to Alex, but it's not worth the effort. We stand there in the hot blue afternoon sun, watching the young corn tassels swaying in the I-State breezes, and eventually Alex says, almost to himself, "If only we had a normal car."

I want to say, Alex, we're not normal, so just forget it, but then he already knows that.

Instead I sprint across the lanes of hot I-State pavement and start trying to hitch a ride back to Kansas City.

Chapter Two

But griff isn't unusual for Alex. It's normal. One day we went up to Venice, to check the pulse and girl-watch, and a water balloon hits Alex in the back. He spins around, ready to cast a victim for a "ten fingers of death" kung fu classic, but there's no sign of anybody with water balloons. Where did the balloon come from? Who knows? Why did they pick out Alex? See what I mean? It's him. He swears it's me, but it's him. It's got to be him.

Alex hates riding buses. It's for old people, he says, and school kids and poor people. That's who ride buses in Honolulu. Nobody who owns a car rides the bus. Mambo old men who were born old ride the bus. I think it's a triple seven; every once in a while I like to ride the bus. You've just got to be in the mood.

Riding the city buses is definitely fricative. You wonder where did they dig up all these mambo people? One time we're on a bus in San Francisco, the Cruiser's over in Berkeley, and there's this white guy talking to himself about injunctions and plaintiffs, stuff like that. Is this what happens when you fail law school? You ride the buses and talk to yourself about torts? Maybe the guy went gravitational on Perry Mason reruns, who knows.

I look at the city bus drivers, lots of them women, and I feel sorry for them. Every day they haul around people with some major burr up their butt, poor people whose lives are so loaded with problems that you wonder why they don't just jump off the bridge. You look in their eyes and it's the eyes of the hunted. Tired eyes, like they just drove across country without stopping.

Of course nothing's as good as having your own transpo, hearing a good tune on the dial and blowing past all the bunk boxes around you. And nothing's as spiked as when your transpo's feet are in the air.

There's no worse feeling than trying to fix a car that won't let itself be fixed, that's fighting you every step of the way. Your knuckles are bleeding through the old grease, you've checked everything possible, you've talked nice to it the whole time, and it still won't turn over. You just want to kill it, drive it off a cliff and laugh when it explodes.

It's not always the transpo's fault. We're chugging up a hill in Iowa in our replacement car, a light-blue Falcon, a virtually indestructible vehicle, you understand, but it starts gagging like a fat guy on a big piece of steak. Stutter-stepping like some wizard roundball guard. Now grip this. This is the Midwest, right? It's flatter than a K-Mart parking lot for hundreds of miles. And we're going up a hill! Just a rise, really, but now the car is really acting up, missing, wheezing, catching, sidestepping, dying, then catching again.

I'm driving, and I'm jumping up and down in the torn driver's seat, it's torn because some old fat guy must have driven it three hundred thousand miles doing a Willy Loman number because there's a big crater in the middle. The springs are sticking out of the straw or whatever they used in those days to pad the springs, there is a big-butt rip in the seat cover that we filled with one of Alex's old T-shirts and I'm jumping up and down, praying and banging the steering wheel, "Oh please God, don't let this dog meat piece of crap die, come on baby, you can do it, come on, keep it alive," and the Falcon staggers on, we're almost to the top of this rise, the only one in four states, and then it gasps and we lose pulse.

"NO!" I shout. And Alex is laughing, but not too much because he can see that I'm bent, and he says, "Daz, it can't hear you. Talk to it all you want, but you can't talk it up this hill. We've got to push it."

"Push it?" I scream. "This isn't a Toyota, this is a real machine! This thing weighs! It'll roll right over us like we're jackrabbits!"

We get out, look under the hood, can't see anything wrong, but it's terminal. Alex starts doing his kung fu stretching exercises which I always feel is just for show, so I say, "Cut the griff, there's no girls around," and he says back, "Hey, if you strain your groin pushing this car up this hill" — although I can't say it with his Hawaiian lilt, his little sing-song way of saying something when he wants to talk to you like you're three years old and stupid even for a three-year-old — "then you're going to think there's a red-hot stake in your balls." His imagery is pretty graphic, so I bend over and swing my arms around, doing the same half-assed warmup routine I used to do in gym class.

We grunt it up the hill, a few yards at a time, stop, rest, car starts rolling back, Alex yelling, "Daz, get your brown ass in gear!," push again. Then when we get it to the top, it starts right up.

Condensation in the carb, Alex says. Yah. I know the car is torqueing us, because it's been so good to us until now. It burns about a quart of oil for every 100 miles--we'd have been busted for smog in L.A. in four seconds--but what the hell, it runs solid.

We got it for $200 in Kansas City. We knew the Cruiser needed an overhaul and we didn't have the gitas for that. We'd tried the bus and been fragged off so we decided to buy a beater vehicle, get to Iowa, borrow some money, come back and get the Cruiser fixed. We'd have been better off just getting a job and making a few hun to get it over with, but we didn't feel like working at that point.

You know how many hollowed-out blocks there are in Kansas City? Old wrecks with guys hanging around, decaying just like the houses. We look in the paper, but you know nobody spends money on an ad to sell an old beater, so we take a bus downtown and just start wandering, it's the John Muir Trail of the Damned, until we find this old junkyard.

There's so much old rubbish in this empty lot we can't believe it's a business. Who would want any of these broken down desks, radiators, sagging shelves, ancient radios, and old rusted chunks of iron? There are cars all over, cars in the street, back in the lot, most of them with grass growing out the doors already. A tinny radio is tuned to some oldies station, Nat King Cole, that kind of mambo sound, so I know there's an old guy around somewhere. My legs are tired, we're lost, I'm depressed by the neighborhood and our go-nowhere bus ride, and here we were in a bottomed out junkyard looking for a car.

This old Af-Am guy comes out of the piles of junk and asks us what we're looking for. He's polite but suspicious. "A cheap car," I tell him. "We got two hundred dollars and we need a car." He thinks on that for a while and finally says that he don't have too many cars that are in running shape. I feel like saying, so does the bear make poo in the woods, Jack? These cars are sad, I'm telling you. But he's still thinking about something, so we just stand there waiting for the thought to come out like a slug out of an old tin can.

"There's a car up the street," he finally says. "Runs good. The owner might let it go for two hundred." I'm so naive I think, oh good. Alex is like the inside of a church on Thursday, he lets me do the talking most of the time, and then criticizes me after the deal goes vertical. "How come you didn't say this or that?" he says. "Hey, you do the talking next time," I tell him, and he always says, "Okay, I will," and then he never does. I don't push him. Not worth it.

So the old guy tells us to wait here and he strolls up the street. We wander around looking at all the stuff, we're talking major katakana, like a set of cards from some Las Vegas hotel in a plastic case on top of the seat of a broken plastic riding toy, with a 50's looking lamp that's ugly enough to melt wax plunked down by the front wheel. Alex holds up an old set of bongos with no skins and says, "Hey bruddah, this is great." I pick up a Buick hubcap and say, "We should start a hubcap collection—no, a hubcap museum. In Vegas. Definitely Vegas."

So the old guy comes back, the wheeler-dealer in him in high gear now, and he says the guy wants 250. I say, "We gotta look at the vehicle." So we motate up the hot pavement, past the kids crying and the kids playing, past the weeds and the Colt 45 bottles sticking their necks out of little crumpled paper bags, and turn into a driveway.

There it is, an old light-blue Ford Falcon, maybe a '63 or '64. My heart starts pumping. A Falcon! I mean, this is a classic! This guy comes out of a broken screen door and he's hard, maybe six feet but solid, smoking a no-filter Camel nicsplif, with a what-the-hell-do-you-want expression on his face. He looks us over with a quick glance and waits for the old man to start his part of the scene. "These young men are looking for a car," the old man says. I hate to even meet the hard guy's eyes, but they're softer than I expect.

I get the feeling he wants to know what we're doing here, so I tell him the whole story: we're from California going to points East, our car broke down, it needs an overhaul, we can't afford one, so we need a cheap car that will get us at least to Iowa. The mean-looking guy drinks this in like it was liquid and then turns away to exhale the Camel smoke. I start telling him how we're going to borrow some money from relatives and come back and fix our car when I realize I'm babbling. I just trail off in mid-sentence and nobody says anything. The hard guy crushes the life out of the butt on the cracked asphalt and then he walks back into his leaning peeling old garage. I look over at Alex and he just shrugs.

The hard guy comes out again with a battery. He props open the hood with a stick and puts the battery in. It sparks a little when he's putting on the cables so I know it's good. He yanks open the driver's door and sits down, making himself comfortable like it's a sofa. The key is already in the ignition, so he turns it over and the engine grinds some as huge black and blue clouds of smoke pour out of the tailpipe, and then it catches. It sounds like it's running on three cylinders, but he revs it, chokes it, plays with it, and eventually it evens out. The muffler's shot, the tick-tick-ticking of the tappets is louder than it should be, but I like the old piece of junk.

Mr. Hard-ass is sitting in the car very comfortably, holding the wheel with one hand, and I get the feeling that he likes this car, maybe had good times in it and I feel kind of sad.

I'll tell you why the Falcon spiked us that day in Iowa. It was annoyed, and rightly so, because Alex had drag-raced it. Stupid, right? I can't put all the blame on him; I was sitting there laughing my ass off the whole time.

We had a six pack of brewkowskis in the cooler. We don't drink and drive, we aren't stupid, but that afternoon was hot and we felt like having a beer with lunch.

So we stop in at a local choke-and-puke, grind down some burgers and we're ready to vector when we notice these guys next to us in an old small-window VW bug. It's basically down the road already, but somebody was trying to fix it up a little. The driver is revving up the engine, like he's trying to clear the plugs. So Alex gets a wild hair up his ass and revs up the Falcon. Not just once, like a warm up, but repeatedly, like a challenge. I think it started out as a joke, like yah, check out our piece of scrap, but the other guy revs back and Alex can't refuse.

I should have seen heavy jank on the horizon. Once Alex moves, look out. If he's asleep, you're safe. Otherwise, forget it. So Alex rolls down the window and exchanges a few words with the guy, "Hey wanna show us what you got?," "You kidding?," "No, show us," "Okay."

So we follow them out to a paved farm road that's straight as an elephant's dick. I'm slightly warped, two BKs down and a third one open between my knees, and I'm saying, "Alex, I don't know about this." I've never been in a drag race before and I'm worried about dying on this god-forsaken piece of road, James Dean style.

What a nominal memorial he has, I'm telling you. Some Japanese guy paid for it. It's up in no-wheresville, between Hellay and the Bay. It's this strat chrome sculpture that looks like it ran away from a museum and somehow made it to the hot dusty wide spot in the road where the Dean-Man finally connected the dots.

Anyway, I've got the h.j.'s. because Alex isn't the most cautious driver and our Falcon might not hold up so well past fifty-five. But Alex has made up his mind, he's saying, "bruddah, is this a machine or what? Is some piece of Kraut crap going to run us down?" Then I know he's at least seven-eighths to the pink because I know he loves old Vee-Dubs. When he's not looking I make a sign of the cross. It would make my Mom happier if she knew I died clean.

So the guy revs his engine and suddenly drops his arm to start the race. He gets a jump on us, it's cheating but nobody gives a damn at this point. Our Falcon is automatic-systematic all the way, so Alex has his huge paw on the thin little "drive one, drive two" auto shift lever. He crams his size twelve to the floor and the Falcon is giving us its best shot. We're gaining on the guy in the bug just as he shifts into third.

That puts him out ahead because third is the bug's best gear, but the Falcon is a tank; it's gaining momentum like a 747 taking off. The road is dog meat, our soft springs are sloshing up and down, and then Alex gets us into "drive two." I think the tranny has just gone vertical because there's this pause where nothing happens and then it suddenly catches. Both vehicles are at full wind-out, but because the Falcon has the weight it's still accelerating. The bug hits fourth, but that isn't do-wa-diddly in a bug for acceleration and we are definitely gaining on it.

I'm pushing against the cracked dash, "Come on you dog keep going," and Alex looks like he's trying to push the gas pedal through the firewall onto the pavement. What a glorious moment when we steam past the bug!

I look at the speedo and the poor thing is between ninety and a clean hun. Does Alex ease off? No, he wants complete and total victory, so he keeps his foot on the gas until I feel the lug nuts vibrating off the hubs and the pistons straining to jerk through the hood and the whole vehicle is shaking itself into parts. I finally have to yell at him. He eases off and the fields are in slow motion again and death gives us another reprieve. Fricking Alex. He attracts it like flies on fertilizer.

So we pull over and the other guys come along side. I'm afraid Alex will lord it over them, but he's beach to my relief, praises their machine, admits they beat us in the quarter mile, and we offer to buy them some brewkowskis. Naturally, we end up warped and lost. Total and complete misery.

And the car was torqued, too. You laugh, but cars do have souls. Some will hang in for you long after they should have bought the yard. This one was willing to be good to us, but what do we do, we drive it a hundred miles an hour! Who wouldn't be annoyed? So that's why it died on that Iowa hill. It was paying us back for hacking it. Once we'd suffered a little, then it forgave us and started right up again.

That car did all right by us, I'm not spinning you. It never really broke down, I mean ass-kicking broke down. Here's the really weird thing—we drove it back to Kansas City and sold it back to the same hard-ass for only twenty less than we paid for it! And he was happy to see it again, too. Who says life isn't strange?

The guy was so pleased with the deal that he gave us a King Tut splif. Alex has this superior attitude about herb; it's always Hawaiian is "da best" and everything else is dried horsepoo. So he takes a puff of this and I expect the usual skag, but instead he kind of concentrates, like hey, wait a minute here, and he takes a short second toke before passing it over and swirls it around his mouth like it was fine wine.

Alex says, "This is Hawaiian weed, bruddah," and Mr. Hard-ass says, "So right." Alex is getting a little excited, saying, "I think this is Puna Butter, from the Big Island," and the man is grudgingly respectful, saying, "Right again, that's what they call it." So I say, "Oh wow man, you win a free subscription to High Times." But Alex ignores me and pretends to savor this wonderful weed. Alex. Sometimes he's so frustrating you'd like to punch him out except that then he might shred you.

The great thing about both the Lancer and the Falcon is the full front seat. All these German and Japanese transpos have bucket seats. You can't sleep on them. I read somewhere that Volkswagen was trying to track down the 400 people who had been born in Vee-Dubs in the past thirty years, and I thought, man, I hope the mother gets lifetime chiropractic care. They must mean the microbuses because having a baby in a bug would be totally loopy.

The article also said that VW regretted not being able to track down everyone conceived in a VW. Now that could be a hell of a lot of people in the buses, but I think somebody should give an award to everyone conceived in a bug. Or maybe an award to the parents. You'd have to be midgets, contortionists, or mighty quick on the draw to do it in a bug.

So the good thing about these old American vehicles is the full front seat. When you've both got to sleep in the car, and you have to rotate between the back and front seats, you come to appreciate that nice roomy seat and the column shift. Sure, your legs still cramp up and the windows get foggy and the earthquakes from big rigs rumbling by wake you up, but at least you won't impale yourself on the stick shift. How'd he die? Oh, he turned over in his sleep and it got him right through the heart, poor bastard. Or be awake in the middle of the night trying to stuff a T-shirt into the crack between the seats so you can finally, finally get to sleep. Meanwhile you want to kill the clown snoring comfortably in the back. Jerk, why should he get to sleep when I get this torture rack?

Chapter Three

After awhile, you run out of conversation on those long stretches in the open states. You just stare off into the distance and start thinking things, maybe a bad memory or how something should have gone. You say something and the other guy just says, "Yeah," like sorry pal, I'm bored out of my mind and too tired to talk. Other times, you want to talk but there's nothing to talk about. You try to make something up, like "Remember the time we got ozoned and...." or "Hey, what're we gonna do when we get to...."

But all the good stories and all the good plans have already been talked about by New Mexico, so you talk about things you see. "Hey, look at that tumbleweed." "Sure is lonely looking out there." "Six big-rigs in a row—a new record." "Look, a rig with Vermont plates. Didn't know they had any up there." It's not much of a conversation, the other guy just nods or mumbles, "Yeah."

We developed a few things to ease the boredom, but even they didn't always work. One was trying to cross the lane dividers without hitting any. You know the lines of little white bumps that separate the lanes? It looks pretty duck-soup to just ease over into the next lane and not hit any, but it's harder than you think. One time I slipped through by accident and then bragged about it. Of course Alex figured that anything I could do, he could do better, but it turned out to be harder than he thought, so it became the game. After a while we got pretty good, so the challenge is to make a smooth four-wheel transition.

At first, we did one wheel and then the other, but that was too easy. So it got to be like the Olympics. Was it a smooth and nectar 10, or was it flawed? Correcting in the middle lowers your score. Sometimes we got pretty bent, like, "That was a ten," "No way, bruddah, you jerked," "Hey spin it, it was perfect." You have to be careful, because there's no escape in a car. If you're torqued at the other guy it totally stones the whole day.

One time we stopped for gas in a small town. Alex is driving; we'd gotten mad over some minor hack, and I go to the head to take a leak. When I come out the car is gone. I ask the pump jockey what happened to my car, and the guy says, "Your buddy drove off." For a second I'm really torqued, I want to kill that Hawaiian, but then I know he's just jerking me.

Now I could mess with him and disappear, but then he might really get fried and leave me, so I decide to play it beach. I dig some quarters out of my pocket, buy a juice from the usual grimy machine, and just sit on the curb waiting. At first, I'm thinking of some funny lines to say when he drives up, but after a half-hour I'm really smoking.

He finally pulls up with a kind of hidden smirk on his face. I open the door, get in, and say, "Don't pull that griff on me ever again. It isn't amusing. Remember the movie where the guy can't fall asleep because the other guy will kill him and run off with the gold? Just remember, slick, I sleep very lightly. A Mack truck can drive through the room and you just roll over. So don't frag me, okay?" He didn't know what to say and we dropped it.

It's a scary thing, how a bad joke could have blown up the whole trip. Some things you just can't forget. Now I know why people end up clawing each others' faces off, you know, men and women. A few things you can't forget and that's all you remember.

I did get back at Alex for that drive-away stunt, but you have to swear on the holiest of holies not to ever tell him because if you do, then he'll grind me into fertilizer, I'm not spinning you. You've got to swear a blood oath to never tell this story to anyone, okay?

I read that if you take someone who's asleep and you put their hand in warm water then they piss in their pants, and I wanted to know if it was true. I get into these experimental moods. One time I pressed my own carotid artery until I passed out because I read you could do that. Sounds dangerous, but I'm completely normal. Yah!

Anyway, one night we're in a fleabag motel and I can't sleep. I think it's because we were drinking brewkowskis, and that puts me to sleep right away and then I wake up later in the middle of the night. So I'm laying there thinking about this experiment and I decide well what the hell let's give it a try on my old snoring buddy. I get up—no problem because Alex sleeps like a mummy, a Hawaiian Rip Van Winkle—and I run the sink water until its nice and hot and then I take that little plastic ice container they always leave in the room and I fill it with nice warm water. It's the three bears, not too hot, not too cold, just right.

Then I creep over to his bed and start pulling the sheet a little, just slow and easy. I have to get the sheet off of him enough to free his arm. This takes time, because even though I know World War Three wouldn't wake him up I've still got the heebie-jeebies. If he knew what I was planning, it would be World War Three and I'd be the first casualty.

So I ease the sheet off and then I get him to roll over so his arm flops free. I know from experience how to do this, because every so often, maybe every week or so, Alex starts snoring and it sounds like cats screwing, it's awful, so I pinch his nostrils shut and he shifts positions and stops snoring. I was dropping bricks the first time I did this, but I was nearly out of my mind after listening to him for an hour, just hoping and praying he would die in his sleep or whatever it took to stop the snoring.

He claims he doesn't snore, that I making it up, even though one night I taped it all on our little boom box. I stuck the mike right up against his nose for about five minutes. But when I play it back he insists that I did the snoring myself because it sounds so fake.

By the time I get his hand free the water's cooled off so I have to go get hotter water. When I got back he's rolled over again, which really spins me. This time I get hot water and then start to work. I finally free up his arm and gently dip his hand in the water. Damned if it doesn't work! He must have emptied a whole brewkowski into that bed. I got up really quick and made it outside before I started laughing. I knew I had to laugh my ass off now because if I laughed later and give away the experiment I'd die a dog's death.

The next morning he must have got up before I did so I missed the discovery, which is just as well because I doubt if I could have stifled a laugh at that point. He was looking perplexed, throwing the covers over his bed with a totally uncharacteristic show of neatness. "What's up?" I ask him, and he says, "Nothing."

"Do you feel alright?" he asks me, and I say, "Well, I got a splitting headache from that cheap beer. Why?"

He just shakes his head and says something about that beer jerking his body around. From that day forward he never drank that brand of beer again and warned anybody who did that it was jank and would do weird things to your body. Meanwhile, I have to keep a straight face the whole time and say, "Hey, no kidding, it's horse piss."

Now remember, this is a nominal secret. Even if you spill it I've got total deniability or plausible deniability or whatever the government calls it because I can lie and smile the entire time if my life depends on it. I tell the truth but I'm talking my life here, slick, this is no joke.

You know, this crossing the lines without hitting any of those little bumps is not easy. Try it and you'll find out. It takes real concentration. In New Mexico I'm practicing on an empty stretch of I-state, just weaving back and forth trying to find the right rhythm while Alex is dozing.

I'm really in a groove, hitting three clean four-wheel transitions in a row when all of a sudden I'm jerked right out of my body by this loudspeaker voice saying, "Pull over." I look in the rear view mirror and nearly drop a brick because there's a state trooper right on my bumper in a big Dodge, the kind with a 460 for high speed chases. I start saying, "Oh man, oh man," and Alex wakes up.

I take my wallet out and put it in my lap and put both my hands on the top of the steering wheel. I learned this from an older cousin of mine who's a cop up north of L.A. He told us one time about walking up to a car he'd just pulled over. He looks through the rear window and sees the guy leaning over like he's pulling something out from under the seat.

So my cousin gets a little nervous because the guy could be going for a roscoe, you know how many fools carry guns under their seats, so he bends way over and sneaks up on the guy and then just whips his .38 against the guy's skull and says, "Drop it asshole or you're history." The guy pisses in his pants, I mean really pisses in his pants, because he's holding a beer can, not a gun. He was trying to hide his half-empty beer.

So I do what my cousin told me: no fast moves, stay in the car, hands up high on the steering wheel.

The cop comes up to the window and asks to see my driver's license and registration. It's a blast furnace outside, but this guy is beach; he's moving very deliberately. His shades are telling me he's a badass but his voice is in neutral, just idling. My heart is racing, but I'm thinking, hey, it's just a warning, don't worry. He spocks that my transpo's from California and I could feel his suspicion. He says, "Just sit tight," and then he goes back to his vehicle. But I'm gripping the scene, Jack, because I know from my cousin that he's checking the computer to see if we have any arrest warrants or tickets. So I relax, because I'm Mr. Clean; I've never gotten a ticket.

So when the cop comes back and says, "Okay son, step out of the car," I nearly piss on my Converses. What's going on? I get out, and now the scene has Alex's full attention. I have a napkin in my shirt pocket from some lard-faced drive-in we'd stopped at, and the cop asks to see what's in my pocket. I take out the folded napkin and give it to him, saying, "It's my napkin from lunch." Maybe he thinks I'm keeping a few spliffs wrapped up in the napkin, who knows.

"You know you were weaving quite a bit," he says. I say, "Yeah, I know, officer, I'm sorry. I was doing it on purpose." I figure I better tell the truth because any lie is going to sound defective. He's looking at me like I just said I was the President of the United States in disguise, and he says, "And what purpose would that be?"

So I say, "I was bored. It was a little game to keep me alert."

"There's better ways to keep awake than weaving all over the road," he says, and I feel like saying hey, no, really? Then he says to Alex, "I'd like you to step outside the car here with your friend, son," and when Alex does, he says, "Now I want you both to place your hands on the hood of your vehicle and just stay put until I tell you otherwise."

It's about a hundred-and-ten in the shade and the hood of the Cruiser is frying pan city. The green paint picks up the heat real good, it's gee Mr. Wizzy, my science project is solar heating of steel out in the New Mexico desert. My hands are really starting to cook, but the cop leisurely frisks us and then goes around to the other side of the car and makes a little search, rummaging through all the junk behind the passenger side.

Then he says, "Would you mind showing me the contents of the trunk?" I'm spinning out, my vehicle is being searched like I'm a dealer! I say "No," and Alex gives me his what-the-hell-did-you-get-us-into-this-time-asshole look.

I vector over and open up the trunk, and I feel ashamed everything's such a mess; our sleeping bags and boxes of food and the ice chest are all covered with Big Mac containers, magazines, old soda and beer cans, a lot of trash. I'm standing there and he says, "Just put your hands back on the hood, son," and he pokes through this traveling garbage dump for a while.

Then he says to me, "Okay, your partner can get back inside. Why don't you slip off your shades?" I realize I can't see his eyes, but he wants to see mine. So I take off my Ray-Bans and he puts his shades real close to my face and stares into my eyes. In that sun my pupils would be tiny anyway, so I don't know what he's looking for.

He asks me to stand on one foot and I get the h.j.'s, thinking oh please don't fall over now! I have this image of me having to ask my dad to bail us out of some hellhole jail. Alex’s dad was less than pleased that the cell phone he’d given us was already pancaked, but that was nothing compared to having to post bond to get your kid out of jail. I'm thinking he'll kill me; he'll fricking kill me. But I manage the one-legged flamingo act okay and the cop says I can get back inside.

What's funny is that he doesn't say jank about the drug search. He just leans on the door with his face and hat and shades inside the Cruiser and tells me to get out and do a few push-ups to get my oxygen going next time I feel bored. It's one-oh-nine in the shade and they're performing experiments on melting asphalt and I'm supposed to jump out and do a dozen. Yeah, my oxygen will really get going, along with my heat prostration. "Yes sir, Officer," I say, "Thank you, thank you," because I'm so grateful that he didn't find Alex's spliffs and I didn't have to go to a hellhole jail with mother rapers and father rapers and God knows what other scumsuckers.

But here's the good part. While we're standing there, trying to just touch the frying pan hood of the Lancer with our finger tips, then our palms, then the side of our palms, then back to the fingertips, I see a vehicle blow by. This is one scene I will never forget. It's a new minivan filled with the old-style family, Mom, Pop and the brats. And for one split second, just a flash, I see these brats staring in awe, in awe, of our deep desert bust scene. Here are two guys getting smoked right in front of their eyes, this wasn't some phony bust on TV, this was real life. They couldn't change the channels, and their eyes were wet and wide.

It gives me some satisfaction that my brief moment of infamy had a little moral lesson for passing brats. It can happen to you anywhere, kids, so don't even start. Even the desert isn't safe.

Needless to say, Alex demanded the steering position and I got to lay down in the back seat and cool off from what almost went vertical.

Chapter Four

A couple of big ugly white jock types had somehow picked me to spike in junior year. They called me "Hagan Daz" and whipped towels at my bare butt in the locker room. I didn't have protection from the home boys because I wasn't in any gang, didn't live in their neighborhood, hell, don't even know Spanish worth a damn.

I went out a couple of times with some of the wimpy shy ones who were like me, but the older guys were in another location. Their women looked about thirty, the type who would suck you off in the front seat while you're driving, spit it out the window, and then kill the taste with a swig of tequila. They looked, how you Americans say, experienced. And all this jank about guns and drugs and who screwed who and was gonna die a dog's death and cars and cheap beer, sitting around looking tough waiting for something bad to happen—it's not me. These guys see me as white, so they don't feel comfortable with me either. Never mind my dad is old-line Californio, a padre here and there but mostly Indian; I speak only English, I'm wimpy, no tattoos, I don't smoke, or listen to their music, got no girlfriend, never shot anyone, just not a whole hell of a lot in common. Plus my mom is white, the pale Scots-Irish type, and I live in a white neighborhood, so I'm a stranger even if I had looked exactly like them.

So they ignored me and the white jocks called me "Hagan Daz," as in "ice cream butt," har-de-har. One day I said something back, something wise, and it went unappreciated. They pantsed me on the far end of the field during P.E. and I had to slump over so my gym shirt would cover my dick and kind of shuffle off like a hunchback to the showers.

You get the idea. I was their chosen plaything. After the pantsing I was a total laughing stock. Even my friends were ashamed to be seen with me for a few weeks. And they, I mean the big white guys, kept referring to it in the locker room after that. I tried to ignore it, I mean what else could I do? I knew all my friends were just glad it had happened to me instead of them.

Alex was the new kid in senior year, some guy from Hawaii who kept to himself. He was on the football team, but only the other guys on the team knew who he was, and I guess he never said much to them. I'd spocked him the first day, maybe because I had a feeling about him. He was about the same color as me, bigger of course, because his dad is a tall haole guy and his mom is Hawaiian-Chinese; the Hawaiians are not small people, but Alex wasn’t big enough to play lineman.

So we're out on the field in between games, the kind of situation I dread. With nothing better to do, these assbites would start jerking somebody around.

Sure enough, these guys start their usual line, "Hey let's pants the ice cream cone again, see if his dick got any longer." This is still early in the semester, right? Alex is standing there with his arms folded while these numbnuts taunt me.

I put on a grin and try to go along, yeah, ha ha, it won't be much fun, you've already done it before. But that doesn't stop them, even though some of the scholar-jocks are starting to look uncomfortable. One even says, "Why don't you lay off," and the biggest scumbag challenges him to, quote, "Shut up or do something about it," unquote.

I turn to my tall skinny friend, but he's getting scared and puts some space between us. He knows if the conditions are ripe it will be him that's hobbling off the field trying to cover his nuts instead of me.

This asshole feels a little cocky so he pushes me, to aggravate me or maybe just to lord over me a little. Alex steps over with his arms still folded and says, "Stop fucking with him."

The scumbag turns to him with a stupid grin and says, "Who the hell are you and why should I care?" Alex says, "If you mess with him then you're messing with me."

This big assbite must weigh at least 200 because he's six-four or close to it and beefy—he's a shot putter on the track team. He has about thirty pounds and four inches on Alex. He says, "Am I supposed to be scared now?"

I turn to Alex and say, "Hey, it's okay," but he's staring intently at this big scumbag.

Nobody's ever seen this assholina get close to a real fight. Alex makes it easy on him. He tells the guy, "You mess with him again and I'll break your ass." Some of the other jock jerks start hooting, because now their friend has his nuts in a wringer. He can forget the macho posturing if he doesn't take Alex right now.

But the big gorgon isn't totally stupid, he tries to buy some time. He says, "Okay, moke, after school behind the auto body shop." He knows the cops or the principal will stop it and if not, he'll have all his friends there to make sure he wins. But Alex says, "Not later. Right now." And he walks up to this guy, about three feet away, his arms still folded.

I figure Alex is going to get punched out and humiliated, and all because of me. Now the other guys are really quiet, looking around for the coach, but he's jacking off or talking to the girl's coach or some other slackmaster action.

So the buttwipe is in a real quandary. Finally one of his friends, one of the guys who's always right with him when they're in my face, says, "What Tod, too much for you?"

Now the guy has to do something because of the audience. Thirty guys are watching him melt down. So he acts like he's starting to turn away and then throws a punch at Alex's head, a real wicked punch that would have taken my head off.

But Alex is human lightning. He dodges the fist and then grabs the guy, spins him around, buckles his leg from behind and pushes him down. Then he twists the jerk's arm up behind his back and shoves his face deep into the grass and shouts, "Eat!" The guy is struggling, he keeps turning his head and trying to free his big legs that could press 250 pounds, but Alex has him pinned like an insect in biology class, Alex is a demon, and he tells the guy he's going to break his arm. Then he jerks it up so hard I figure it broke right then.

The asshole is kind of whimpering and he finally turns his head into the turf and takes a big bite, just like it was spumoni ice cream instead of grass. Alex twists his arm one more time with a powerful jerk, and I see his muscles are rippling under his smooth brown skin like steel cables. Then Alex looks up and spots the big drib's friend, the one who egged him on, and he points to him and says, "You!"

The guy freezes like a big dumb animal who just spocked a cheetah, and then he starts running toward the locker room. Alex is after him in a flash and the scene looks just like "The Wild Kingdom" because Alex is running low and smooth and this other guy is running like a scared ox. Alex catches the big numbnuts, drags him down and after a brief struggle the second asshole is tasting his first big bite of grass.

Now here is Alex's genius. I don't know how the guy thought this up. He could have broken their arms, or made their faces look like gargoyles or whatever, but they would still have had some pride. It was a fight, and they lost. But there was no fight. Alex put them down and made them eat dirt. Made them eat dirt, can you grip that? The news spread like wildfire that this crazy moke had stood up for the little half-breed greaser and made the two big proud jocks eat dirt. Eat dirt! You have no pride left, assbites; you have just suffered total and nominal humiliation.

Now the coach comes running up the steps as Alex is crouching on this second jerk's back. The coach is swearing, "Jesus Christ, I was only gone a few minutes," and Alex gets off the guy's back, and slaps, just slaps the back of this guy's head as if to say, remember this well, asshole. You egg your friend on, you suffer the same fate.

The coach grabs Alex by the arm and Alex shakes free. The coach wants to know what the hell is going on and I'm afraid that Alex will make him eat dirt too so I jump in and say that it's my fault.

The coach seems relieved that there's a simple answer to the who-is-guilty question, and he grabs me by the arm and says. "Okay, what happened." So I say that these two guys were razzing me so I flipped them off, they grabbed me so Alex stepped in to help. By this time the first big asshole is up and ambling over, with dirt all over his jaw and a look of pain on his face, which doesn't look so intimidating to me or anybody else now.

"Looks like you bit off more than you could chew this time, boys," the coach says to the two size extra-large assbites, and the line follows the rest of the story through the whole school. The Coach knew these guys had pantsed me before, and I think he was pleased they got taken down a notch.

I tried to thank Alex but he brushed it off, saying something about hating big talkers.

All four of us were suspended for a week, which was a blessing to those guys. Not that they were suddenly pussycats. One of their buddies made a joking reference to the action the following week and he visited the infirmary and met with the school cop as a result. Both of them were suspended for a week, too. I heard the principal called up the biggest assholes' parents and read them the riot act.

I was thinking, "Gee, Mr. Wizzy, I thought miracles only happened in the movies" when I saw that big jerk struggling, twisting and turning, grunting and swearing, all to no avail. See how it feels, asswipe! And the way that Alex just tapped the other jerkoff's head, with that, you know, haughty flip, like, hey kitten, don't try it again. I am your master.

Of course they wanted revenge. I found a note in my locker when I got back to school that said, "Someday we'll find you without your moke bodyguard and then you will eat shit." Shit was underlined, just in case I missed the importance of the word. They wanted even more extreme humiliation than their own and I was scared.

I asked Alex for some advice. "Should I buy a gun?"

"No, man," he says, "guns are for cowards. I'll teach you some moves." That's the first time I go over to his house. He shows me his room and garage. The garage has punching bags, one hanging down and one up by the rafters. "Why up so high?" I asked, and to answer he did this kung fu kick that nearly reaches the bag. He looks chagrined and says, "Usually I make it." In his room he has Bruce Lee posters and pages from magazines that show Asian guys doing stick-fighting and other kung fu stuff.

He shows me his weights, and then we go out to the garage again where he unrolls this mat. He shows me some moves from Filipino and Hawaiian martial arts. That's when I found out how much work it is to get good at kung fu. I'm too lazy to crank it out like Alex does every day. Weights, jump rope, meditation, katas. That's why he got the Summer Phys Ed job with the city after we graduated.

Needless to say, Alex's stock went through the roof as a result of this takedown. Everybody gave him wide berth in the hallways and the football guys were afraid to tackle or hit him too hard. He played defensive guard and linebacker. When the season started, everybody found out that he was a demon on the field, too. He turns into a single-minded machine, I'm telling you. One day I walk over to his house and he was messing with his helmet. I ask what he was doing and he explains that he's adjusting it so that if anyone ever face-masked him he could just jerk the helmet off and kill the guy.

He also started getting dates with the lapis lazuli women. One time I admitted to him that I admired this girl who was on the volleyball team. She was nice and had tits from Planet X. So later on he tells me, "Yeah, you know so-and-so's tits? They feel even better than they look." And he gives me this superior grin. "You dog," I told him; "you probably boned her too."

"Hey bruddah," he says, all innocent sounding, "You have to respect them. I wouldn't tell you if I had," and then he punches me in the shoulder, a play punch. It hurt for a week.

Alex just doesn't like arrogant, inconsiderate, obnoxious loudmouths. Did I tell you how we came up with our nickname for BMW's? Big Moronic Wimps? We're at a post office in Fort Worth. Alex has some post cards he's mailing home, you know the really great ones with the corny jokes like the jackalope, furry trout, and giant grasshoppers, that kind of hokey stuff, and there's a red zone in front of the curbside mail boxes.

We want to pull up next to the curb and dump the cards, but there's a red BMW parked there. Parked, grip; no one's around. It's not like the guy is just a little bit in the red zone; he's taking up the whole curb.

"Who is this guy," I say, "King Tut? Nobody else has any letters to mail? He thinks his Beemer gets a free ride in red zones? We ought to jink his snotty little Kraut box."

I'm just spouting off, but Alex gets mad too. He edges up along the asshole's vehicle, just sizing things up. I don't know what he's doing, I'm still motormouthing. He backs up, spins the wheel and slides right alongside the red Beemer until there's about one inch between the two cars. Now the Lancer's bumpers are these big old heavy chrome numbers, with big bulges like young tits on them. There's no way the BMW owner is going to slide past the Lancer without tearing off the gimpy plastic bumpers of his own vehicle.

Now that my door is one inch away from the Beemer's, I blurt out, "What are you doing?" because while I talk big I hate confrontations.

"No worry, brah," says Alex. "Just watch."

Alex opens his door, gets out and hikes up his jeans like he means business. While I'm sitting there wishing with all my might I'd kept my mouth shut, Alex saunters over to a sidewalk trash can and pulls out a can of Coke, a crumpled newspaper, a Taco Hell bag and a half-eaten hot dog. After considering his haul for a minute, he drizzles the Coke over the guy's hood vents, lays some newspaper on the sticky mess and then casually smears a leftover bean burrito over the guy's windshield.

I'm saying, "Oh man," when this chunky white guy with short dark hair comes running out of the post office. "What the hell is this?" he screams.

"You're in a red zone, asshole," says Alex. The guy goes over to push Alex away from his car but Alex's eyes make him think twice. "You like join your car, pal?" says Alex, and we're talking menacing because when Alex is toggled to full Pidgin it's a red flag to approach him with a "I'm gonna kick your ass" look unless you're ready, willing and able.

"I'm calling the cops," the guy says, like it's a big threat. Alex says, "You better hurry," and then squishes some taco sauce right in the side mirror.

This spins the guy out. He's feeling massive alienation, looking around for someone to come to his rescue. But no one's around, Daddy's not here to protect you, buttwipe, and Alex just waves his hand like you do to kids, like go on, get out of here. The guy finally makes a dash for the driver's side, rolls down the window and says something like, "I'll see you hang for this." Alex tosses the catsupy hotdog toward the open window, a beautiful underhand which just clears the glass and lands in the guy's lap. The jerk rolls his window up, starts the engine and squeals onto the curb in full panic mode. Once he's around us he bounces back onto the road and screeches off with a scared look on his face.

That's how we came up with Big Moronic Wimps. We considered Big Monkey Wimp, because the guy was pretty ugly, and some BMW drivers look so spun out we also thought of Big Martian Wimps, but in general Big Moronic Wimps locks it down pretty tight.

It's a pretty good name. Its only flaw is that sometimes it's a woman driving or a small wimp. The women we call Bitch Morose Witches because they never look happy. Spike BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, Saabs, Volvos, Peugeots, Lexuses and Infinitis. Spike 'em all. They always act like they own the road because they spent too much gitas on a damn car. When they're speeding up to pass us we swerve in front of them. When they honk at us we just give them the double bird and shout, "Go get spiked, asshole!" They take one look at our car and another look at us and then they get scared, because they can see we've got nothing to lose.

Chapter Five

All these snotty sophisticates on the coasts like to make fun of the Heartland. But let's face it, the Northeast is the large intestine of the country, and SoCal is the gall bladder. But then I also get tired of hearing cornballs talk about the California crazies. I want to whip out a roscoe and say, "Yeah, you're right, boom boom boom, you're right and you're history."

What I'm saying is that I like the Midwest countryside. Things are growing, things to eat. How can that be boring? Everybody complains about I-5 in the Central Valley, what a gimp it is, but they're alienated. It's great. I never get tired of it. There's stuff growing out there and people busting their tushes helping it grow. Plus there's always mysterious mountains somewhere in the haze, somewhere just beyond the dust, either desert mountains in the west or the Sierra on the east or both.

Now grip this. I love the desert, but that stretch from Hellay to the Bacon Strip in Vegas is, how you Americans say, not all that fascinating. It's pretty interesting from the air, but that's because you only have to look at it for twenty minutes. After twenty minutes it's definitely tired.

It's okay at night, with Hendrix and Electric Ladyland up in the air, with a nice cool wet towel wrapped around your neck, a cold Coke between your legs, the Lancer humming along, and the hot wind whipping through the chrome teeth of your machine. You're burning up dinosaurs and the engine is just pumping, very smooth, very big, reassuring, comforting in the way it just floats along. The night outside looks like there could still be dinosaurs out there. It's dark but the moon is out enough to light up the ghosts. You can really feel the mystery, all the weird unknown stuff that spun down over the centuries.

You stick your head out the window and you can smell the juice of the cactii, and it feels really good to have your hair whipped around. You close your eyes, it's a black desert highway, hot wind blowing sagebrush smell, the Hotel California's lights on the horizon. You can't hear anything but the wind in your ears and the tires moaning on the asphalt.

The stars are out like we never see in the city, making you feel small, small but special anyway, and you're thinking about this girl, about kissing her, about her liking you, and your foot is tapping out the beat. The Lancer is vibrating like a stone woofer, arcing up into your spine, and you get chills even though it's still hotter than a toaster oven. It's like Hendrix wrote it for this desert on this night: princess kept the view, while all the women came and went, barefoot servants too. You can see her, she is so beautiful and she lets you touch her, and it's fine, Santa Cruz beach sand.

This was our very first night on the road, heading for Las Vegas. It's tropo, man, truly King Tut City, to finally be away. After all those months of saving money, fixing up the Cruiser, looking at maps, daydreaming about where we're going to go, we're out. What's funny is I didn't expect much joy off that first leg, but it's one of my happiest memories. It's the unplanned stuff that just spirals in.

Take our visit to Alex's relatives in Iowa. Our plan was to get some money from home, go back to Kansas City and get the Cruiser fixed, and then head East again. There was also this family obligation for Alex to visit any relatives on the way, so it was a two-birds-with-one-stone gig. That was the plan. Instead, well, lots of other stuff happened.

Just like the night drive into Vegas, I expect Iowa to be cripped, a zero. But it's great. The weather's hot beach, we get to see all these giant farm machines, sit in cafes with farmers, and get off the I-states onto little two-lane roads that run past abandoned farms and through these little time-warp towns.

Then his uncle's farm is tropo, a fullrev scene because it's working. They have all these animals—rabbits, dogs, cats, cows, goats—and all this other farm stuff like dead combines and old kerplunkety Ford tractors. Plus everything is green. From a distance, all the fields look like giant lawns. And I met Leslie there.

But not all unexpected stuff is tasty. Some of it is played by Griffin Spike and the Funktones. One scene on the farm went down to the ground for Alex, but I have to tell you another story before I unroll it.

This was when the Funktones played my song. It sounds so cornball when I tell it. It happened at the Senior Prom. Yeah, stratocaster hokey, but the football guys were all going and my Mom told me, "Daz, you'll regret it later if you don't go. There's only one Senior Prom."

Uh huh. It's like the movie: you may not regret today or tomorrow, but you will, and soon, and for the rest of your life. My life is ruined, Doc. I didn't go to the Senior Prom. So I ask this girl Lyn. Nectar cute. I'd liked her for a long time and always tried to get into her study groups and go to parties where I knew she'd be there, just to talk to her, but I'd never had the guts to ask her out for a real date.

So I figure this is it, she's probably going away to college, might as well take a number. So Alex coaches me. It's so ridiculous. You know I'm not shy, I'm always the one who makes the first contact, somehow I don't mind that, but asking for a date, whew. Couldn't I just go crawl around the Vatican on my knees a few times? I pick up the phone and feel my hand turn to Jello. "Nah, Alex, I can't do it, she'll just laugh me off the line."

"No way, brah," he says, "I checked around, no one else has asked her. She wants to go."

So I pick up the phone again. I start to dial, and lose my nerve. "Nah, she'd rather go with someone else. Let them ask her."

"Brah, you know you want to go with her. I just told you she wants to go."

"I think I do better in person. I'll ask her tomorrow."

Alex puts the phone in my hand and gives me the evil eye.

Okay. Here goes. Sweat is dripping off my palms, I feel flushed like I'm on stage in the crappy junior play again but I've forgotten my lines. I'm twelve years old again. I just can't do it.

So finally he gets bent. "Okay, Daz, I'll ask for you. Give me the phone." So out of shame—he's so sly—I just steel myself and punch in the numbers. Oh man, I told myself, just die right now and get it over with. Her Mom answers, she gets Lyn, who accepts immediately. I arrange the timing and hang up. I punch Alex on the shoulder and scream, "She said yes!" I was King Tut, king of the sands of time.

So we go. It's at a fancy hotel ballroom; somehow all those stupid events raised enough money for this downtown yank, and we're all jinked up in these rented tuxes.

"Alex," I say, "you look like a spiked penguin," and he says, "Yeah, but the toughest penguin on this block of ice." He's a cocky bastard sometimes. He drove his old man's Buick. We pick up his date, a lapis lazuli girl he's not really close to, and then we pick up Lyn. God, she's beautiful, just really really pretty. I'm blown down that this is my date. I'm thinking, hey, maybe this will be okay after all.

It's hokey, warpomatic, but sort of fun. The guys are all there, dressed up like you've never seen them, people are dancing and hanging around like they're actually adults. I'm with Lyn, and she seems to be having an alright time. We're with other people, it's too scary to be alone, and she says she wants to see a few other friends. She drifts off and I go over to a group of the football guys. I don't see Lyn around for a long time and I start feeling kind of torqued, like where is she, am I just the chauffeur or what.

So I vector to the patio, feeling kind of low, like what am I even doing here, when I glance over at the parking lot and I see some guy kissing some girl. They're all wrapped up and then I feel this electric shock because I realize it's Lyn.

It's not like I thought she was in love with me or anything sappy like that, it was just a dumb dance, but still I feel a hot flush, like when you see a gun pointed at you, or when something big and fragile is about to hit the ground. I feel blown into pieces that couldn't breathe any more.

I couldn't quite make out the guy, but it didn't matter. If you'd have shot me right then I would have thanked you. I mean, I'd never felt that kind of massive alienation before. It gives me the h.j.'s to remember it. It's like getting gutted, swish swish swish, oh, those are my guts on the floor. My heart's racing, my hands start vibrating, and I'm trying to take big deep breaths, but it's like all the oxygen has disappeared.

I wander back into the room, floating on ice, really cold, and I find Alex. "She's making out with some other guy," I say like a zombie.

"Who?" he asks.

"Lyn." His face gets serious and he pulls me aside. "I'll go kick his ass," he said.

"Nah, forget it," I say. "I'm just acting stupid, man, it's no big deal. It's not even a date." Even though it was just some stupid fantasy of mine dying, I couldn't help thinking, couldn't she even wait until tomorrow? Why let me see them? Why did she do this to me?

"She wasn't that great anyway," he says. "Wait here for me."

I ask, "Where you going?"

"To take a leak," he says, and I stand there, cold and blind and dumb.

After a while he comes back. I'm still standing there, dog turd city, and then this cheerleader comes up to us. She's nice, not phony like I thought when I first met her, and she starts talking to us.

Then one of the football guys comes over with his date and they start talking to us. After a few minutes she asks me to dance. I say, "No, I'm no good," and she laughs and says, "Well neither am I," and she forces me so I try it and it's okay, not as bad as I thought.

After the song ends some other football guys come over and start joking around, telling stories about some of the fricative stuff I've pulled in the locker room, witty things I said that really smoked somebody. So after awhile I can actually see again, see people's faces. By the time the thought enters my mind that all this is just a bit too perfect, I'm already over the worst of it.

Yeah, it was Alex. Afterward, outside my house, I tell him, "Alex, you should be in the movies." We just look at each other, he's smiling a little, I punch him on the shoulder and he grips mine, hard. I feel like crying.

When I tell this story to Benny, Tita's hubby, he says, "You're damned lucky to have Alex for a friend." Well, you sure as hell don't want him for an enemy.

Okay, so Griffin Spike and the Funktones play Alex's number in Iowa. Here's what happens: Alex falls in love with one of his cousin's friends, but she dusts him off.

Looking back, I can see that Alex was blown down because he never got dumped before. He was always careful to not get too committed until he knew the girl liked him. This time love snuck up, cuffed him, read him his rights, and hauled his ass off before he could say ditti-wom-ditti. You know, love doesn't allow any phone calls or L.A. lawyers. There's no Perry Mason to bail you out. You're dragged in, convicted, and your ass is hauled off immediately.

Alex is already acting pretty katakana, alien zone here, ma'am, when something went gravitational one night. We're sitting around like usual in the basement, listening to tunes, the cousins and their friends, including this girl I liked, Leslie. No big deal. Alex is sitting across from Meg, just hanging on her every word and look.

After a while they go off alone, and I think, fricking Alex, he's off for some action. The rest of us do the social oobla-dee a while longer and then I vector to my crib and fall asleep.

Alex shakes me awake the next morning and says, "Let's go." He looks like total dog poo. Fantasy Island has turned into Devil's Island. He's serving hard time. His face looks like he'd crammed it in a dead fire and shaken it back and forth a few hundred times, like one of his kung fu heroes got his ass whipped. He's shrunk up and inward like there's a vacuum cleaner on in his soul.

He's completely spun in so I start joking around, but he's silent as a street at 3 a.m. We go to the main house to say goodbye, but everyone except the mom is already out working. I'm thinking about coming back to see Leslie on our way home, but I don't mention it.

It only takes a few minutes to pack up our stuff, cram it in the Falcon's trunk and haul derriere. I'm driving, still trying to cheer him up with my usual booga-booga. I'm saying stuff like, "Man, wake up and smell the dog crap, hey brah, how about some tunes? God, don't you love the smell of leaking gas in the morning? Let's get some breakfast. I want some grits," and I say it stretched out, "guuuurrreeets," and he still looks like morgue slab city.

I'm thinking, man, nothing is working this a.m., what is wrong with him, so I say, "What happened, your dick fall off last night?"

He just stares straight ahead and says, "Fricking haole." Now he sometimes says this as a joke, kind of a warning to back off, but now he means it and I get the h.j.'s. Haysoos Cristo, an alien ate his brain last night.

"Hey Meestair, what de freeg?"

This phony accent of mine—my sister says all my accents sounds the same, French, Indian, Russian, you name it—usually pries him open, but it pancakes this time. He tells me, "Nothing, Just drive."

"Okay, sure." So I'm driving, its a beautiful fresh-sky morning, the road is open, I feel great except for the Rue Morgue next to me, the igloo in a box that blew in from the Yukon and landed in the Falcon.

Okay, think, what was he doing last night? Mooning over Meg. So that's it, heartbreak hotel: they check in, but they don't check out. "It's Meg, isn't it?" I ask him. He's silent but just ripped with pain.

Now here's where I make my first mistake. I say, "Griff, Alex, she wasn't that great."

He just looks out the window, but I can see that he's blinded, just like I was on prom night. Uh oh, wrong approach, delete, delete, backspace, backspace. "Well, there's other girls," I say.

"Fricking Daz, you're so stupid! There's no one like her!"

Man, how can I be so stupid? I don't know booga-booga about this love mambo. I think oh, to hell with it, I can't do a damn thing for him. We'll just have to weather the storm, what a spiky nightmare, a hurricane-stomped, zombied out, alien-stole-his-brain, broken-hearted Hawaiian stuck next to me in this tiny little box. I look out the window and I see the sun shining on the wheat fields, the air is warm, the Falcon's cruising fine—but it's all wasted. But then I remember how he helped me and I think, I've got to try again.

"Hey look, I know she likes you, she was just in a bad mood," I say.

He's silent. I guess she made it clear that she didn't like him. Dead end. Okay, I'm desperate, it's like final exam time and I've got to figure out what I can riff off of to get the mojo cranked up. Come on Daz, kick in with your best shot, I tell myself, find the volume and let it rip.

I'm thinking, keep trying, you might get credit for trying, you might get lucky. How did he help me? By pegging the girl down? No, then I felt even more ickabod. That's why I felt bulldozed—I liked her. He helped me by making me feel like I wasn't on training wheels.

"Look, Alex. How many girls have you ever liked?"

He's silent, we're in a Charlie Chaplin movie.

"Yeah, well, it's probably been a dozen or so, right?" I say. "And how many of them have liked you?"

Silence.

So I say, "Every one of them, slick, except for Meg. She likes you too, but she's scared of liking you. You're older, and she's too young to know how to handle it. She just got scared."

Come on, I'm thinking, kick in! "Take a guy like me," I tell him. "I'd die happy if I had a dozen girls like me."

There's still no sound, and I'm getting worried that Griffin Spike and the Funktones have drilled him to the core.

"You know," I say, "Meg is really nice, but she needs to grow up some before she can handle her feelings. Give it time, brah, give it time."

And finally I see some life in the coals. There's still heat in there, just blow on them a little and they'll flame up again, and I feel good because I can see he's lifting off the bottom; there's some air back under him.

He was still busted up for a while, but hey, I'm no miracle worker.