the singing knives

Then we all headed down toward the Allegheny River.  We crossed traintracks, and just after we got from one side to the other, a train went clanking past.  One of the best goddamn sounds in the whole world. We walked along a wooded path that was dark, lit only by the lightninbugs that were everywhere, and the intermittent gaps in the trees.  Stacey was leading us to a particular spot on the river – best view of the city, she said.  I used to come out here all the time and drop acid or get stoned. 

We emerged from the woods, climbing through the thicket of trees, pantlegs getting snagged on brambles and branches, out onto a cement pier-like structure sticking a ways out into the water.  I gasped.  There was Pittsburgh, all lit up in front of me.  Pink, yellow, and green lights.  The tall buildings of downtown.  Smokestacks and bridges.  Houses and mountains.  The river went rushing past, smelling like oily secrets. 

She’s beautiful, I whispered. 

I describe cities as women.  I know I’m not the first one to do it, but it just makes sense to me.  If Pittsburgh were a woman, she’d be muscular in a graceful, athletic way.  She’d be wearing a scally cap and her face would be streaked with charcoal.  She’d stretch out her fingers like bridges, and welcome people in.  

Back at Stacey’s house, we met Stacey and S.’s friend M., a math whiz with a killer deadpan sense of humor.  Stacey and S., Ratticus and I, all got stoned from a pipe crudely fashioned from tinfoil, we all drank more of the vile Evil Eye beer, and watched Boondock Saints.  

Truthfully?  I was falling in love with Pittsburgh.  But half of me was still in Cincinnati, in love with B.  I was cramped up on the cot in the psychedelic room, feeling like an invisible hand was reaching into my chest and smashing my heart into a bloody pulp.  I cried for an hour before I drifted uneasily into sleep.  

That night, I slept with the window open.  The cool dark drifted in, along with the scent of pinesap and steel.  I could hear the trains all night long.  

I was awoken in the morning by the sound of churchbells ringing through the hills, and the smell of potatoes being fried somewhere in the neighborhood.  And just like that, everything was good again.  There was a pot of coffee brewing downstairs, I thought about all the adventures that were yet to come on the road trip, and I was at peace with the fact that I couldn’t be with B. in the way I wanted to.  Love is always a good thing, I thought, even if it doesn’t work out exactly the way you’d like it to. 

I was fully in Pittsburgh, finally, so I could truly experience the city.

Limbeck - “In Ohio On Some Steps”

How do you feel? Maggie asked. 

Meh.  As good as can be expected. 

Really?  I feel like crap.  

We got stoned again, and then started on the long stretch of highway toward Cincinnati. 

The day was hot as we drove through central Illinois.  Dead animals lined the roadside – raccoons, possums, deer, even a coyote here and there.  The sun beat down and made everything smell like tar and meat.  There was an irrepressible summer highway feeling, sun tanning my arms, road grit blowing into my eyes, bugs going splat on the car grill.  The smell of cars and death, and The Stray Cats pouring out of the stereo. 

We stopped for food at a Perkins in Galesburg, home of Carl Sandburg.  I noticed the Carl Sandburg Shopping Center, and as we sat at Perkins, waiting for our sandwiches, getting refills on our coffee, I talked about the Carl Sandburg Shopping Center and the GAP commercial that said, “Kerouac wore khakis.” 

Is nothing sacred?  What’s wrong with this country, that we take people who were creative and brilliant, and use them to sell products?  There should not be a corporate shopping center named after a man who was all about folklore and farmfields and the small-town, Ma and Pa store.  There should not be a commercial that uses the image of a man who was all about counter-culture to sell an overpriced pair of pants.  Mr. Sandburg and Old Dulouz would be turning over in their graves if they knew. 

Peoria was foggy and all the hills curved down toward the snaky brown river.  Leafy green trees were everywhere, and the tops of the hills blinked with the red lights of radio towers.  I thought maybe I’ll live here one day, or at least come visit.  Who knows why it struck me that way.  I doubt there’s much to do there.  But there was something about the coating of the fog and the one or two tall buildings, placed randomly by some giant, godly architect, which got to me. 

I once considered going to college in Champaign/Urbana, and then realized that it was in the middle of a fucking cornfield and I would have drank myself to death on bathtub gin if I lived there.  I was tempted to it in the first place by poetic lyrics from late-‘90s emo songs. 

About halfway through the trip, my phone rang.  It was my mom again.  I had an unpaid parking ticket from March, from Kenosha, and so the Kenosha Police Department had suspended my license plate.  We were driving across the country in a car that was not legal to operate.           

But there was nothing I could do about it then, was there?  So we continued to drive too fast, to get stoned in the car, driving toward Ohio.  Keeping an eye out for cops, but not worrying too much.  Everything’s more fun when it’s illegal.  Now we were real outlaws.  I felt like we may as well start robbing banks in every one-horse town.  

We had been seeing classic cars, from the forties up through the seventies, most of the way.  The closer we got to Cincinnati, the more old cars we saw.  It was blindingly colorful – sun reflecting off metallic silver fenders; white and mint-green, peach and red and yellow paint.  Everyone driving the cars was dressed in their best – scarves were wrapped around necks, folks had donned leather caps and suede jackets.  There was a moment of us traveling in the past.  All the cars on that certain stretch of road, other than mine, were from the early fifties, and Maggie said, while looking at a particularly fine red convertible: 

Ain’t she a beauty? 

Yes, Neal!  Yes, she is!  Didn’t I tell you this trip was going to be the best? 

Sure thing, Jack. 

We had already been calling each other Jack and Neal.  I mean, Maggie was born in Denver, just like Neal Cassady, and I’ve always felt a kinship to Jack Kerouac.  And on the road so far, we’d already been doing too many drugs, digging on some fine young chicks, having visions, smoking cigars that smelled like woodfires, and here we were driving in the fifties… 

Seven p.m., and we were finally in Cincinnati.  I called B. up. 

We’re here. 

Meet me at Sitwell’s? 

Yeah, just tell me where it is.

I met B. in September, when I was on tour with the Perpetual Motion Roadshow.  We bonded over cheap beer and honey-flavored cigarettes, and conversations about Tom Waits and God and equations.  B. is the son of a preacher man.  B. is the kind of person who can make a loose-fitting old-man shirt and pair of khakis look like the most well tailored suit in the world.  B. talks about math with his hard-to-pinpoint city accent, and it sounds like poetry.  He tells great stories. 

The night I met him, we spent a slow-motion ten minutes holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes.  Nothing more could happen, because he had a girlfriend.  Then we started corresponding, sending each other rambling, philosophical e-mails – the twenty-first century version of a romance through letters.  I was a bit sad at first, that nothing could happen between us, but ultimately, I felt lucky to know him, and glad that we were friends.  I was anxious to see him again, and sure that after nine months, the feelings I had would have waned. 

I was wrong.  

Maggie and I waited for B. at Sitwell’s, a coffeeshop on Ludlow, the hip-young-crowd part of Cincinnati.  He calls it “his coffeeshop” – he used to work there, and over the years, it has been a place where he has spent much of his time, talking with friends, or just sitting alone, reading H.P. Lovecraft stories or working on physics problems.  It was packed, voices swirling together overtop of the music, and odd conglomerations of art hung on the walls.  A thin string with a few pieces of cloth hung over it separated the smoking section from the non-smoking section.  We drank our coffee in the non-smoking section because there weren’t any tables open in the back.  The shelves behind the wooden counter were lined with shiny bottles of every kind of liquor imaginable.  Every time the string of bells on the door jangled their tinny warning that someone new was entering, my nerves jangled along with them. 

When they jangled for the tenth time, and it was B., I stopped breathing.  He walked over to us, said: 

Oh, Jessie, it’s so good to see you, 

and nine months melted away and my brain shot up flares and blared sirens: oh fuck, oh fuck, I still have it bad for him.  

After hanging out at Sitwell’s for a while, watching night drape itself around us outside the windows, B. suggested we go to a bar. 

Well, see, that would be lovely, but Maggie is under twenty-one. 

Ah, we’ll just go to the Golden Lion, said B..  They won’t cahd. 

So we walked the block from Sitwell’s to the Golden Lion, everyone was out in that Cincinnati night, walking the hills in the humidity, going to movies, having conversations in restaurant windows spilling over with light.  B. told us to go to the upstairs part of the Golden Lion, where the pool table was, and wait for him on the swiveling vinyl stools.  He would buy the beer.  He bought a pitcher of foamy, gold beer, and poured it into glasses for us.  The bubbles went straight to my head – I hadn’t eaten much that day.  B. kept giving us cigarettes and when I protested, saying: but cigarettes are expensive, I don’t want to smoke all yours; he said: 

But you’re on the road, this is the leahst I can do.  Besides, cigarettes ah meant to be smoked, not saved. 

The bar was painted purple and the air was hot and close, smelling of tangy sweat and yeast.  The three of us could barely hear each other talking above the karaoke to bad new wave music that was going on in the front room, and the shouting of the people playing pool. 

B. knew some of the people that were there, and he introduced us, and I don’t remember any of their names now. 

This is Jessica Whiskey, he said to them, she’s an independent media maven. 

Suddenly, I feel awkward, he said to me.  Probably because these kids knew his girlfriend as well, and as much as I still had it bad for him, it was obvious he still had feelings for me.  The flirting started immediately.  We kept looking at each other, looking down at our laps, taking long swigs of beer, staring at the smoke that came out of our cigarettes.  Then we’d look at each other again, and he’d raise an eyebrow, and I’d giggle and say what? and he’d say nothin’ and give me a curious little half-smile. 

More friends of B.’s came in, and his friend T. was distressed – her car had broken down and she was supposed to go pick up her girlfriend from work. 

You guhls go back to Sitwell’s and wait for me, said B.  I’m gonna take T. ta go pick up C. 

So it was back to Sitwell’s where I ordered a shot of Johnnie Walker scotch and was amazed to find that when you order a shot at Sitwell’s, they bring you half a glass. 

Maggie and I passed the time by talking to a friend of B.’s.  We told her tales of the journey so far – of almost getting run out of town with pitchforks in Iowa, of making out with drunk girls in Milwaukee. 

Oh, drunk girls, she said.  They’re usually sloppy, but their eagerness makes up for it. 

Yeah… we agreed.  

B. came back and sat down, introduced us to his friend Megan who had run in, all breathless, from performing at a nearby open mic.  She was a hippie-punk, with homemade safetypin tattoos on her wrists, a tangled mass of chocolate-brown hair like electric sparks flying off her head, and torn, paint-covered overalls.  We talked about love and poetry and folk music, and she was beautiful and full of life, and she talked about her passion for Cincinnati and how she was going to hold a carnival sometime this summer because she had so many talented friends who could do so many things. 

What’re you gonna do for it, B.? I asked. 

Only spoken word.  Nothin’ else.  I can’t do anything else. 

You could be the barker, you’d be perfect for it. 

Yeah, I could do that. 

And then, in a perfect gruff imitation, B. called out: Step right up!  Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, come and see the Cincinnati Carnival.  Gasp in fear at the freaks, see things you never imagined possible… 

I have to go perform another song, said Megan, and B. said: Let’s go take a walk.  I’ll show you my town. 

B., Maggie, and I walked up and down Ludlow, and on a few sidestreets, and he pointed his landmarks out to us – apartments he had lived in, places he had worked, parties he had been to, fights he had seen.  He showed us what restaurants had the best Indian food, told us about the local crazy people, and characters in the cast of life that were now dead. 

This is a rather personalized tour of Cincinnati, B. said. 

Personalized tours are the best kind, I replied. 

Walking around the hills of Cincinnati will make your calf muscles strong.  The humid air was sticking to me, I felt as though I could’ve peeled clouds right off my skin.  Everything smelled like garbage and flowers, and baking sweet bread from the bakery where B. used to work.  Cicadas were everywhere, flying in our faces, filling the nighttime with their electrical bzzz, making horrible squishy crunching noises when we stepped on them.  Another plague of insects. 

We ended up at a fountain, near where our car was parked.  The water was lit from beneath with spotlights, and it was littered with fallen leaves and cicada corpses.  The center of the fountain was a statue of a water sprite turning into some sort of architectural structure.  B. said the fountain was built in tribute to a man who had shot himself right in that very spot – the fountain was named after him, even. 

Legend has it, he was playing Russian roulette, said B. 

And I thought: that’s the kind of city it is.  Cincinnati names its monuments after men who shoot themselves during a game of Russian roulette. 

Then the three of us climbed into the car and locked the doors.  Maggie and I got stoned while B. sat in the backseat, telling us more of his stories.  An ant tickled the back of my neck, and I kept looking back at B., illuminated in the silver sliver of moonlight, sweat dripping trails down his face. 

That was intense, he said, when we stepped back outside, gulping fresh air.  

I pulled my accordion out of the car and then it was back to Sitwell’s.  A boy with long black hair strummed softly at a guitar, and I squeezed notes out of my concertina.  We sang words that were meaningless, but sounded pretty.  Megan was back, and she talked about a boy she liked who had just come back to town. 

I just don’t know what to think, she said.  I thought he liked me, but he’s with this other girl… 

I know how you feel, Megan!  I wanted to scream.  B. and I had our knees touching under the table, and his touch made my flesh burn.  I was drunk, and stoned, and I wanted to grab him, to kiss him, to tell him that I didn’t understand.  I don’t understand monogamy.  If you want to be with someone, and they want to be with you, you should be together.  There’s no reason not to, not age, not other relationships you may have, damn what society says.  Love, like, and lust are good, no matter where you find them.  And being in love with one person does not prevent you from loving many other people. 

B. was comforting Megan, telling her: 

Ya know, he’s an okay guy, he’s a friend of mine.  But he’s no good for you. 

It was amazing to me, how much B. cares for his friends.  The way he was treating me and Maggie to beer and smokes and coffee the whole night, the way he drove T. to get C. after T.’s car had broken down, the way he was trying to sew Megan’s ripped heart back up.  More people in the world should be like that. 

Megan had made a mix tape, and she was telling us about it. 

It’s such a good tape, she said.  I was brokenhearted, and I made this tape to make me feel better. 

Give it to them, said B.  They’re on a road trip.  They need mix tapes. 

It’ll be cathartic, said Megan.  I made the tape, and now I will give it to someone else.  It will prevent me from dwelling on it. 

So she scribbled her e-mail address on the yellow construction paper cover, and handed us a 90-minute Maxell tape.  

It was closing time at Sitwell’s, and B. took Maggie and I to the Warner House.  It’s a punkhouse that his older sister owns, a house that’s always full of parties and shows and transients.  B. went inside: 

Is it okay if Jessica Whiskey and Maggie Mayhem stay here? 

And it was. 

The three of us sat on the front porch for a while, Maggie on a broken-down wooden chair, B. and me on the soggy couch.  We smoked a pack of cigarettes, and talked, and I don’t even remember what we talked about.  All I remember is the azure light of the moon, and that B. and I kept moving closer and closer together, until eventually, we were holding hands. 

Silence fell, and the only sound I could hear was the cicadas and the slight rustle of hot wind.  B. would squeeze my hand and I would rub my thumb over the top of his. 

It hurt too much.  I knew that if he didn’t leave soon, I would kiss him, and he would kiss me back, and do something he might’ve ended up regretting. 

B., I said, I’m tired.  You should probably go. 

He looked at his watch.  It was early morning. 

Yeah, I should go.  I’ll call you around eleven tomorrow, and we can go for breakfast. 

He hugged the breath out of me, said, once again, Oh, Jessie, it’s so good to see you, and then left, and Maggie and I dragged our stuff inside The Warner House.  

Did I mention that I hate it when people call me Jessie?  Somehow it seems patronizing to me.  Jessica is fine, Jess is good, too.  I hate being called Jessie, but B. calls me Jessie, and I melt.  

I fell asleep with my back pressed against a hardwood floor in a room that smelled like cat pee.  The last thing I remember before drifting into unconsciousness is a firefly entering the open window, and flying around the dark room, flashing on and off, a warning of some kind. 

I woke up shaken from bad dreams about missed opportunities.  Nightmares that made me think I should have taken my chance the night before.  Just like the firefly had been trying to tell me – your chance may not come again.  Blink and it’s gone. 

B. called like he said he would, and took us out for breakfast at a greasy spoon.  The kind of place that makes a hot day even hotter, where you can feel the grease collecting in your pores.  The egg & cheese omelet and hashbrowns I had were cheap, and came with crispy toast, and even the coffee tasted like it had butter in it.  There was a television screen hanging on the wall behind the cash register, and day four of Ronald Reagan’s funeral proceedings were playing on it. 

I’m sick of all this Reagan shit, I said. 

Yeah, I mean, he was really old, and he’s been brain-dead for years anyway, said Maggie. 

He was a horrible person.  He was our Margaret Thatcher.  He dies, and somehow he becomes a national treasure. 

Damn cowboy presidents. 

We all hung our heads in mourning; not for Ronald, but for a country that continues to be so caught up in the myth of a rootin’, tootin’ hero that they elect presidents that seem to treat matters of national import as though they’re shoot-outs in an Old West saloon.  

Let’s go for a walk in the pahk, B. said.  

It was a stiflingly hot day.  Smoking wasn’t enjoyable; it just made my stomach feel sour, and my lungs tight.  You couldn’t get away from the heat – not even when you were sitting in the shade.  Cicadas were everywhere – flying into our faces, dropping from trees, and carpeting the ground.  But we went to the park – climbed, panting, up crumbling stone steps that were cut into the sides of steep hills.  We played on the swingset.  B. pointed out different types of mushrooms, orange and off-white, that grew out of rotted tree stumps.  I wanted to shake my fist at the universe; there were moments in the park that were perfectly romantic, as if to say: This is what you can’t have.  We walked side-by-side through the woods, under a natural canopy of trees, dimly lit and cool, chipmunks darting around, birds squawking intermittently.  We walked through a field that was sprinkled with Queen Anne’s Lace, and tiny white butterflies playing in the hot sun.  We bought pretzel sticks and fed the ducks in the pond.  There was one duck, a beautiful downy white one, and he was the only one who would come anywhere near us, splashing in the shallows of the murky water to get the bits of pretzel.  The other ducks ignored us. 

I’m sahrry the ducks were so anti-climactic, B. said, and I said: They weren’t, really.  They’re ducks.  What did you expect them to do? 

We all rested in a park pavilion, and I’m sorry to say, I was ignoring Maggie.  I was just talking to B., and listening to him talk.  Anyway, she was busy filming the human wildlife – a local wingnut that B. had told us about the night before.  John the Baptist.  A very old homeless man with a very long, gray beard, who always walks around with no shirt on, clutching a two-liter bottle of orange soda. 

On the walk out of the park, to Sitwell’s, B. and I were doing the “I’m so attracted to you, but nothing can happen, so instead I’m going to act like I’m in grade school” thing.  We were teasing each other, bumping each other’s shoulders, and play-fighting.  Had my hair been longer, he probably would’ve pulled it.  I half expected him to pick up a dead cicada and throw it at me, its dried-out brown body and iridescent wings sticking to my shirt.          

I haven’t expressed properly how much pain I was in that day.  I fall in love a lot, true.  True, it wasn’t the first time in my life I’d experienced something like what was happening that day.  That doesn’t mean it hurt any less. 

Here’s what it felt like: I was falling apart.  All my bones were going to come splintering through my skin.  If B. didn’t touch me, I was going to disintegrate, turn into a pile of dust and free-floating molecules.  It wasn’t about sex.  I wasn’t thinking about him that way.  I just needed a kiss, like CPR, to put the breath back into my collapsing lungs.  

Sitwell’s again.  We drank cups of water, and iced coffee.  We sat at a table in the back.  There was a lamp on the table, with a beaded maroon lampshade. 

I was in an odd mood, not really knowing how to behave.  I said stupid things and laughed a lot, out of nervousness, really, not because anything was particularly funny. 

I think the humidity is rotting my brain, I said.  I’ll become one of those crazy people that hang out on Ludlow.  You can tell stories about me. 

Only if you stay.  If you leave, I won’t tell any stories about you, B. said. 

Damn you, B., for tempting me to stay in Cincinnati.  You know that would be an extremely bad idea.  

Maggie got on the computer to do LiveJournal updating and check her e-mail, to see if our contact for Columbus had written to her, and I was left sitting across the table from B.  We talked about music.  They were playing The Clash on the stereo – I recognized it immediately, even over the din of chattering people and clanking spoons and glasses, even though it was the live album. 

Yep, that’s Joe Strummer’s voice, I said. 

There’s no mistaking that voice, said B. 

And then I heard the opening chords to “Train In Vain.” 

I need new clothes, I need somewhere to stay.  Without all of these things I can do, but without your love, I won’t make it through… 

He flicked a bead on the lampshade, and its shadow floated back and forth on the table. 

Last semester I took a class about things that move back and forth, like this – B. waved his finger in the air – or like this.  He flicked the bead again.  When we were on the swingset, I was paying very close attention.            

Sometimes, the space between things is more important than the things themselves.  B. and I were sitting across the table from each other, and each of us had an arm resting on the tabletop.  Although our arms had less than a foot of space in between them, that space said everything.  My hand should have been resting on his hand, but those six inches were a distance that could not be closed.  I stared at the blonde hair on his arms, illuminated by the faint gold lamplight. 

It was like a scene out of some goddamn black and white indie film, one where the director uses gesture instead of dialogue to tell the story, to make it more artsy. 

[Interior of coffeeshop.  Day.]   

Boy and Girl are sitting on opposite sides of a table, facing each other.  There is obvious tension between them.  Boy absentmindedly stirs his coffee with a spoon, the spoon clinking against the sides of the thick white mug.  Girl fiddles with a cigarette, before finally lighting it.  She follows the smoke with her gaze, not looking at Boy.  Boy and Girl look up at the same time, make eye contact.  

Boy [softly]: Are you pleased?  Are you happy?  That’s all I want, you know, is for you to be happy. 

Girl [unconvincingly]: Yeah, sure, I’m enjoying myself. 

[They both look back down at the table.]  

Let’s play the straw game, B. said. 

He stood up, walked to the table that contained the creamer and sugar and napkins, and grabbed fifteen of those thin red straws you use to stir sugar into coffee. 

Play the what? I asked when he sat back down. 

The straw game.  Well, really, you can play it with anything, but we have straws here so we’ll play it with straws. 

Here’s what you do.  Whatever you’re playing with – coins, stones, whatever, you need fifteen of them.  You make three rows.  One row of seven, one row of five, and one row of three.  When it’s your turn, you can take as many of the objects as you want, but only from one row of the setup.  Whichever player is the one to remove the last object, loses. 

You can play it with any sort of small item, but I found it rather appropriate that we were playing it with straws.  I was new at the game, so I had no strategy developed yet.  B. obviously had his strategy worked out.  We played a few rounds, and he beat me every time.  I was always the one left with the last straw.  

It rained while we were in Sitwell’s.  The hot sun disappeared, and although it was still humid, it turned chilly and gray and wet.  We were only in there for about two hours, but by the time we were ready to emerge – I was about to cry, and Maggie and I decided we needed to get back on the road – the sun had come back out, evaporating all the puddles, and the heat had returned.  Cincinnati weather is funny like that. 

B. walked us to the car, rubbed my head, and hugged me for a full two minutes.  I leaned my face into his chest and just listened to his heartbeat, tried to memorize his smell and the way he felt.  I tried to memorize it because as much as I didn’t want it to be true, I knew that was it.  That was the most that would ever happen between us.  His heart was beating rapidly, and he smelled of cigarettes and oranges. 

Have a safe trip, he said.  Come back anytime, I’ll always be glad to see ya. 

Then he got in his car and drove away. 

Fuck, I said.  Tears were rolling down my cheeks despite my best efforts to keep them away.  I felt like puking.  

Look, snails! Maggie said. 

I wiped the tears off my face, sniffled, and looked at the low stone wall surrounding the house we were parked next to.  It was covered in snails, all different sizes, with shells all varying shades of brown and gray.  Some of them even had speckled shells, and one had a shell that was a pearly purplish-blue.  They were all inching their slimy way along the stone wall. 

We petted them gently for a few moments, watching as their antennae retracted back into their heads and then sprung back out again when we stopped touching them.

And when we had to stop back through on our way to Iowa, to pick up a few stray things we had left at the Hoasis, I couldn’t believe how perfect everything was. The light was cool and purple; and all I wanted was to be on California Avenue, walking along by the river and eating a taco bought from a twenty-four hour bodega.

But I knew it was illusion. I knew that it only looked that way cos I was on my way out, and if I had stayed, had wussed out on the trip, I would have been depressed.

Oh, yeah, and we were homeless. That too.

So we pressed on, to Iowa.

We headed west, straight into the sunset, the whole horizon on fire. Past Rockford, past Aurora and Naperville, straight west through Illinois, into Iowa, on Interstate 80, into the darkness.

At some point we pulled over at a truckstop on I-80, right after you cross over the rushing Mississippi, into Iowa, all lit up with neon and chrome, a beacon to weary travelers in the night. It wasn’t just any truckstop, either – it just so happens that it’s the world’s largest truckstop. You can do just about anything you’d want to, there. Get tattoos, get massages, eat, sleep, play arcade games… We walked around the perimeter for a while, letting the oxygen back into our muscles. The stars were blocked out by the glare of stadium-sized lights. The freeway was humming all around us. There was a group of five kids – four boys and a girl – sitting at one of the outdoor picnic tables. They were dressed in tight black pants and high-top Chucks, one of them was wearing a Ramones t-shirt. They had come in a big white van, stopping there on their way to somewhere else. They were probably a band; probably on tour, like us. I contemplated asking them where they were from, and where they were going. On the road, I always want to ask people that question. The families, the loners, the truck drivers, hitchhikers, punk rock bands, lovers, best friends – where did you come from? Where are you going? There’s so much more in the answers to those questions than a simple geographical location.

Then dropping down, to southern Iowa, near the Missouri border. Hunger stopped us in the middle of nowhere, through a town with two streets, lined with signs for Baptist churches. We bought gas station pizza at a place called Casey’s, and ate it in a parking lot that smelled of metal and rain. There was also the distant smell of sweet grass in newly mown fields, and the constant, low singing of a chorus of crickets. The sky was littered with stars and the moon hung low in the sky, a cardboard cutout of the universe painted with glow-in-the-dark paint.  

After blasting music to keep me awake, and Maggie driving the home stretch, we pulled into the gravel driveway of her mom’s house at around one in the morning.

Are we going to be in New Jersey at all on this trip? Maggie asked.

We could be. We’re going to be right across the river from it.

I hope we see the Jersey Devil. Or something supernatural, anyway.

We’ll see something. I see supernatural things wherever I go.

We sat on the porch steps before going inside, smoking one last cigarette.  I told a story about feral creatures hiding in the woods, and the rustling of the wind in the trees had me sufficiently spooked.

I showed him my switchblade & he said hurt me, he asked me to cut him, I liked his tattoos, his argyle & kitty litter, his fur.

I was on the rebound from my Irish boy, Icehouse boy, & some other guy, too, some asshole who made poems out of cigarettes & booze, my life was a series of overlapping rebounds & I remembered that song I’d heard a month before at that basement show, Leah Quinelle’s All-Stars singing.

If I can’t have the one I love, I’ll just have someone else.

I lined him up, one more bowling pin, one more dead soldier in the powder-blue (mid)night & I had confetti in my eyes, the sparkles made everything wonderful wonderful wonderful.

We smoked cigars, sometimes a cigar is just a reminder of sex, not even the obvious phallic symbol but the smell of bonfires & lounge lizards & the smoke so powder, blue.

when times were hard, which they mostly were, when money was skint, which it mostly was cuz we spent our paychecks on rent + bills followed by booze, vintage clothes, & punk shows—food came last, or there just wasn’t a paycheck at all that week—we ate w/e we cd get our hands on. we knew the bakeries that gave out dayold bagels & bread & we’d have those smothered w/ hummus or chives & cream cheese if we were lucky or plain when we weren’t.

other times some kids from the vegan house wd come over w/ a dumpsterdive haul, heads of sad cabbage already half-wilted, bellpeppers & zucchini only a little bit moldy & if you just cut the moldy bit off they were fine. we’d sauté it all up w/ some garlic & olive oil & pass around plates of vegetables, maybe w/ rice, & we’d eat while someone ranted abt anarchism & someone else lamented their polyamorous lovedramas.

when times were better—if a. got her alimony check or i got a nude modeling gig—we’d make garbage plates for breakfast, scramble up some eggs & mix ‘em in w/ the dumpstered veg. despite the name, the eggs themselves never came from the garbage. we were flat broke but not idiots unlike our friends who once ate half-melted icecream sandwiches they’d found in a dumpster & all got sick.

a lot of nights we ate pizza, cheese pizza, the cheapest kind we cd find in the frozen aisle, the kind so cheap it tasted not much better than greasy cardboard w/ a bland marinara. it was a. that taught me abt putting hotsauce on it, she had a collection of hotsauces from around the world, all different peppers & flavor profiles, & she was right, if you dumped enough hotsauce on it even the cheapest, worst pizzas were o.k. we’d heat the pizza, put a record on the turntable in mine & k.’s room which was just off the kitchen, usually johnny cash, we listened to a lot of johnny cash in those days, then the three of us poured hotsauce on the pizza & sat eating it while johnny w/ his baritone sang “it ain’t me, babe,” or he duetted w/ june’s scooping soprano & they sang abt ‘we got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout.’

when i went to st. louis that april, when a. & i were still sorta friends, before she got real crazy & started trying to turn me & k. against each other & accusing my girlfriend of stealing her candles, i found this shop that, amongst its other oddities, also sold a bunch of unusual hotsauces. i bought a. a bottle from the carribean, w/ rum & jerk spices, for k. i bought a marble that looked like a glass eye.

no. 1 the ground was damp and muddy, so much so that we almost got our shoes stuck in it. it made slurping sounds as we tried to pull our feet away. like a swamp. “watch out for alligators,” I said. we were all standing outside the dorms, haloed by yellow campus light, half-drunk and smoking cigarettes. introductions were made, and Jon put on his big sunglasses and started singing U2 songs.

no. 2 my drunkenness had gotten me over any inhibitions I might have had. “hey,” I told him, “I always did think you were cute.” and so when Lissa went to sit on a splintery picnic bench to make out with a long-haired hippie boy, I said: “ya wanna make out with me?” we stepped off into the shadows near the dumpster, and soon he had his strong arms (toned from playing rugby) around me, and I was burying my face into the soft fabric of his “Runnin’ Riot: Belfast skins” T-shirt.

no. 3 midnight in Michigan. I was in the backseat of the car, my parents were up front. my dad was driving, and freaking out, because we were stuck in traffic. they were doing nighttime construction, laying down tar under harsh, artificial light - because in the summer, work is better at night when the sun isn’t out to make you feel sticky and melted. I couldn’t handle my parents’ yelling, so I put my headphones on. I listened to Tom Waits croon “Midnight Lullaby,” and looked out the window at the stars.

no. 4 Ali and I were in my car, driving back from the Flogging Molly show. our ears were ringing and we felt bruised and sweaty, like a fight, like rough sex, but really we had just been dancing. our throats burned from screaming so loud. it had all been worth it, for the way it had made us feel alive. we didn’t pop any tapes into my stereo, preferring instead to harmonize together on some Flogging Molly songs: “ring-a-ring-a-rosy, as the light declines. I remember Dublin city in the rare oul’ times.”