Horse-Powered Broom Horse-Powered Broom The wind swallowed ...
The wind swallowed the cacophony as we approached 70 miles an hour. Nobody in the cab of the pickup heard me. I was riding in the back: standing and kneeling, clinging dearly, pounding my fists into the cherry-red siding. I flailed my arms at the cars passing us by?often, at no one at all?and bared my teeth with reckless disregard for where insects might come upon their fate. The few who saw grinned. Nobody failed to wave back.
It was a blazing July day, the sun slow-roasting the whole of Oklahoma. We were heading along U.S. 64 from Tenkiller State Park to nearby Gore, to a liquor store with rusted steel cages on its bulletproof windows. Every color was saturated into a natural neon, from the pthalo green of sloppy large leaves to the weighted turquoise cap of sky. We slowed at a stop sign, and I hushed as the whipping breeze did. The truck took a left, and I lay down and let the hot metal radiate into my bare legs.
After a death, a divorce and mental illness that skipped generations other than mine, I was in a state of constant panic. I was reclusive, suicidal and reckless. A psychiatrist threatened to commit me. Epic stretches of insomnia were accompanied by a soundtrack of racing thoughts. The sleep deprivation alone was causing me to hallucinate. When I wasn't pacing or downing stale gin at 3 a.m., I found myself online, doing anything I could to distract myself from myself. It was the mid-90s, and the internet was a fairly new beast. The only people enthralled with it signed on to scan back issues of 2600, taking a break from their BBS. Them and the pagans.
I'm still not sure how I ended up in their chatroom, but there I stayed, night after night, until my body finally acquiesced and shut down. Aside from being an atheist's crash course in ancient religion (from Imbolc and Sementivae to Enku and Amun), the room was an ant farm. The regulars proudly shouldered their conflicts, shouting fervently and solemnly moralizing. The more we realized how insular our lives had become, the more we clung to our existence with an off switch. And there we wallowed: jobless, recently divorced, morbidly obese, crippled, paranoid-schizophrenic and ostracized, and, more often than not, 16 and wearing too much Wet 'n' Wild Kohl eyeliner.
The first time I met them, it was after a 19-hour Greyhound ride from Baltimore to Detroit at a hotel also hosting a comics convention, and, inexplicably, about 50 Baptists in zoot suits. My bed was broken well before I got to the room. Three days later, irrational as ever, not wanting to go home, I tagged along to upstate New York in a Winnebago to stay on a farm with a llama, near Buffalo.
The last time I saw them was in Oklahoma. I'd driven there with Michelle and Chris from the Bay Area and Max, a massage therapist from Seattle who had followed me across state lines the first time around. The trip was uneventful?36 hours in the backseat of a Pontiac Firebird with Chris and all of our luggage, our feet wedged on the ceiling, half of my ass falling asleep.
We switched to the pickup after dinner at a Denny's in Barstow, and we finally had some bits to remember: tearing through red-rock canyons in darkness; a thunderstorm in the desert that nearly pushed us off the road; sneaking into a Motel 6 in Albuquerque to shower; breaking back in to the truck in front of a Dairy Queen in north Texas, and jumping the grass divider between Rte. 66 and I-40; getting lost at an abandoned power plant not far from the Arkansas border.
On arrival, we promptly drank enough to keep us from standing up the next morning.
And so it went, few remembering the etiologies of their petty rivalries. Everyone either spoke in catty hushes, or laughed and screamed. We swam in the lake, climbed in the rafters over the barbecue pit and watched children scatter naked through the grass. We got chicken fried steak at Jimbo's in the morning and burned dinner over an open flame. Michelle got stoned enough to fall asleep on a slab of concrete, three inches from a live scorpion. Chris reunited with Electra, his 22-year-old "bisexual virgin" girlfriend who practiced Santeria. Max's hands traveled to where hands shouldn't travel when two good friends are navigating in the front seat; we spent most nights in a tent, sleeping when the white plastic betrayed us and let in the rising, scalding sun.
Max and I were followed around by a 17-year-old who kept post outside of the tent while we slept, a la Rebel Without a Cause. A heroin addict sat picking through the grass, unsure of whether he wanted to move. I spent a week in the sun, learning the topology of someone else's body. The amazingly friendly Okies asked how I was doing?"Just fine, just fine. Yourself?"
There were no custody battles or bail hearings or long nights alone. For me, there wouldn't be again. While everyone else was skittering around gyroscopically to keep themselves from paying attention, I was in the back of a pickup, braying and bellowing and singing, standing firm and never caring for an instant if my shins gave out, trying to notice every spider bite and salty drop of sweat. I could taste and smell and breathe.