this is real fucking life
nine hours into the drive i want to close my eyes
we're south on the route 7 detour and the three cars in our caravan loose sight of each other
and it makes me too nervous to sleep so i call them
and they got a flat so they're changing it on the side of the highway at 4 am
so we in the vibe and the others in the stratus, we groggily call the other to find a place to wait
for the buick
and there is nothing, not a streetlamp or a telephone wire
lights appear on the horizon and stay there, the gps can't tell us shit
we pass a church and decide to keep going instead of u-turn,
the same thing happens again with another church, a ranch, a decrepit floodlit plantation house
and finally we pull into an adult video arcade
where the air is cold and clammy and the semis have nestled in for the night
the girls say they can see one of them jerking off in the truck and i'll take their word
the buick calls to say they're back on the road
and then again to say they just blew the donut
and a little light comes into the air and lame jokes and the eighth through tenth too many cigarettes are passed around
and what do we do? much too much speed-smeared thought goes into this question
we follow the gps up a mountain to a tire store that probably doesn't exist and if it did... but it's too much to even think about and we escalate until most of our signals die and then we turn back because
the buick's calling aaa and we're gonna wait with them
so we backtrack about nine miles,
park at a long farm driveway with a peeling plank advertising "FRESH EGGS"
and cirrus trails cross one another and pop out of the brightening sky pink, orange and yellow
but where are the planes?
we laugh, almost sleep but can't, get gawked at by locals, take memorable photos, imagine being shot at or taking a dump behind a silo, can't imagine the shape we'll be in by the time we're back on the road
i climb through the sunroof and smoke on top of the car,
i ride with the tow driver and billy back to point pleasant, wv and the others follow us
he tells us we're next to the only north-running river he's ever heard of beside the nile
he tells us we're in the hometown of the mothman,
the sun hurts, the air hurts, the world hurts and weighs on my consciousness and this is the kind of thing i ought to be dreaming instead of living
why the fuck did i eat at mcdonalds next? (breakfast in point pleasant unless we wanted something fancy, says the tow man)
can't finish my second sausage biscuit, smoke another cigarette at the mothman park, finish mccafe
poke around the mothman museum and resist a t-shirt of cornstalk's last stand and the world's only mothman frappuccino,
appear in more bitching photos next to the mothman statue that commemorates his tattered wings, his amber eyes, his incredibly muscular abdomen
i think we put on the stones or mott the hoople on the way out of town, but who can remember something like that?
i got high and finally slept on the west virginia turnpike, the most wicked road i've ever encountered
my grandfather literally said it was his idea of hell but i didn't remember that either. my dad had to tell me.
