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Baked Alaska: How Drugs, Tourism, and Petroleum Tamed the Last Frontier

Few things are more depressing than watching the titans fall. Willie Mays stumbling around centerfield in a Mets uniform. Johnny Carson becoming a recluse. Aretha Franklin dueting with Kid Rock. It’s why even though I’ve got no problem with guys shooting guns, I can’t stand hunting magazines—all those dead grizzlies.

So it’s good that on the last New Year’s Eve in the life of Juneau’s old Red Dog Saloon, I’m not yet aware that I’m watching a beautiful thing die. Perspective often makes things worse, and the night is already going badly enough. Without an end-of-the-year party to crash, my large-living, gap-toothed friend Randy and I have defaulted to the Dead Dog, planning only to ring in 1984 with a few rounds of Rainiers and another installment in our ongoing discussion about how we need to get the fuck out of this town and meet some Down South chicks—Down South to people in Alaska meaning Seattle as much as anywhere else.

Dark, wet, windy conditions keep Juneau tourist free in winter, so the bar is filled with the usual crowd: Gor-Texed locals, emotionally bankrupt state-worker clones, recently imported granola crunchers from Oregon, and a table of flannel-wrapped miners—good Juneau guys, the kind who take their showers after work, not before. Primed for the approach of midnight, the partying miners are anchored by a mastodon-bearded and spectacularly foul-mouthed Viking monster whose menacing laughter and constant demands for more booze lend the night the kind of edge most often associated with Premier League hooliganism. Even scaling back for inevitable exaggeration, I put the guy at six five, 250 pounds. Trim another inch and 30 pounds off him if you must, but on the foul-mouthed point I claim perfect memory. You don’t easily forget the evening you become acquainted with the term “felching” or listen to a rogue Norseman repeatedly refer to his own mother as a cunt. Wife or pregnant daughter, cunt, sure. I’d grown up around fishermen and hunters, not Trappist monks. But this guy was trouble, even by Last Frontier standards.

Eleven forty-five hits. Behind the bar, the harried waitress begins prepping bottles of Cold Duck or Andre or whatever other sugar-saturated crap makes people at weddings and bad New Year’s Eve parties think they hate champagne. That’s right, Rainier beer, flannel shirts, and unwed teen mothers, and I can still find room to be a champagne snob. Who among us isn’t a walking contradiction?

Eleven fifty. The Viking stands, balances more adroitly on a tippy chair than you’d expect, points to his watch, and begins the countdown. “One minute till midnight, motherfuckers!” A moment of confusion while drinkers around the bar check their wrists and look at the deer-antler clock on the wall. Grunts of protest arise from a few nitpickers seated at the bar. “Hey, asshole, check your watch. It ain’t midnight yet.” No matter. The Viking’s eyes have rolled too far into the back of his head to see anything. Miraculously, his mouth keeps moving.

“Forty-five! Forty-four! Forty-three! C’mon, motherfuckers!”

No one in the bar is man enough to tell the besotted giant he’s wrong, that 1984 still belongs to the future. Without much fuss, the room simply gives in to the weary group dynamic you saw after both Dubya elections. You know something isn’t right, but at some point you just stop resisting the tide.

“Four! Three! Two! One, motherfuckers! Happy Fucking New Year!” An awkward what-the-hell-happy-new-year shrug momentarily unites the bar. Soon after his preemptive celebration, the Viking passes out and everyone settles into a post-midnight funk. Already hammered on the cheap beer and bubbly, half of the crowd is also entering the catatonic period that follows any encounter with Matanuska Thunderfuck, Alaska’s legendary smoke from the Matanuska Valley. The twenty-four hours of summer sunlight during the brief but intense growing season there is said to power the weed with the knockout strength of a rutting moose.

Ten minutes later, the bawdy cheers of legit countdowns from fifteen other bars echo down South Franklin Street and through the Red Dog’s swinging doors. The miners sit unfazed. To them, 1984 is already ten minutes old, so what’s the big deal?

Returning from the bar and dropping two new Rain-dogs on the table, Randy looks at his watch and slams half his can in one gulp: “We gotta get the fuck out of this town.”

 

Drugs changed my life in the seventh grade. Not because I started taking them, but because everyone else did. In the 1970s, Juneau, Alaska, ran on drugs. Amphetamine-fueled fishermen maximizing time on the water. Stoned state employees coping with dark winters and cubicle summers. Coked-up capitol workers more connected to the well-being of South American coca farmers than constituents back home. Even before our national acquiescence to antidepressants, everyone apart from my parents seemed to be on something.

During my first year there, Floyd Dryden Junior High earned brief notoriety for being mentioned on Paul Harvey news for having one of the highest percentages of students in the United States who, according to a recent study, admitted to using marijuana, cocaine, or “hard drugs.” If anyone else was taken aback by this revelation, the students of Floyd Dryden were not. The only thing that surprised us was the study’s qualifying language. “One of the highest?” Was it possible there existed a preteen community more steeped in narcotics than our own?

I don’t recall having been sampled, but the study foreshadowed a life destined for the moral fringes. At the time I was part of the less than 20 percent of Juneau twelve-to-fourteen-year-olds who apparently were not spending large chunks of the school day toking up in the woods outside school and memorizing the lyrics to Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak.”¹

But the vices that convulsed Alaska in the 1970s and ’80s affected more than just the medicated progeny of Floyd Dryden Junior High. (Then nicknamed the Wolverines, Floyd Dryden has since been renamed the “less aggressive” Eagles, and if you want any more succinct indication of how Alaska has been softened up by Lower Forty-eighters you won’t find it.) Drugs were only the start. Having embraced one narcotic of the day, young, isolated, unguarded Alaska would prove no match for a pair of even more corruptive influences that went by the genteel names Hospitality and Resource Development: tourism and oil.

 

Along with me, mega-cruise-ship tourism in Southeast Alaska grew up in the 1970s. To facilitate the early compliance of locals in those salad days, major cruise lines cannily treated Juneauites like VIPs, allowing them to walk right onboard the ships that began tying up at the state ferry terminal. Locals could get a drink in one of the garish bars and gawk at the magnificent vessels that were bringing daily infusions of dollars from Down South.

It wasn’t long before ambitious bureaucrats in the state’s Department of Tourism saw in the cash cows floating in the sleepy harbor a new gold mine—Juneau’s original A.J. mine having been tapped out in 1944. Despite the fact that the former territorial capital was largely unknown to the outside world, they envisioned it now as the centerpiece of a national marketing campaign. And offered incentives to get it rolling. I worked the push firsthand, sort of, spending a few months as a part-time lackey in the Department of Tourism, stuffing brochures and six-color, spot-varnished posters of hanging glaciers and breaching orcas into cardboard tubes for mailing around the world. If you were one of the many grade-school kids doing state reports who wrote to Alaska in the fall of 1981, I was very likely the guy who sent you all the cool stuff.

Then one day, as if by magic, the most enchanted force in global tourism took note of our efforts. The Love Boat announced it would be sailing to Juneau to film a special episode. Fabulous publicity. Town atwitter. Forget that out-of-town rubes and virgin wilderness generally get along like orange juice and toothpaste. This was gonna be huge for tourism.

And it was. Along with half the town, my sisters bivouacked with their empty autograph books (who ever came to Juneau?) at the Mendenhall Glacier and collected signatures. Captain Stubing, Doc, Julie, Isaac. All the giants.

At least one reader on www.jumptheshark.com has since recognized “the Alaska trip” as the episode that once and for all buried the venerable “Fuck Barge.” But in truth it was The Love Boat that got the best of us. All it took to turn the last unspoiled wilderness in America into a check-it-off tourist destination was a national audience that raised a cultural touchstone from the weekly spectacle of Scatman Crothers, Charo, Reggie Jackson, and Florence Henderson making whoopee on an imaginary cruise ship. Throw in a few “prices slashed” Princess cruise promotions up the Inside Passage and a national marketing campaign jobbed out to some PR firm in New York and you’ve got the makings of an old-fashioned stampede. This one with gold cards instead of gold pans.

By the summer following The Love Boat’s appearance, one or two ships docking in town had become old news. It took three, then four, then five in port to attract the attention of jaded locals. One day, without announcement, the friendly ships you could walk aboard were gone, replaced by larger, oil-belching crypts that anchored offshore and disgorged their charges onto land by covered tender. Soon, more tourists sailed into Gastineau Channel each summer day than actually lived downtown. The floating cities arrived, poured cash into the South Franklin Street wampum shops by day and backlog sewage into the pristine waters by night, then stole away under cover of darkness.

Downtown Juneau vanished. Like Old Singapore and Times Square, the rough-edged city was dismantled by a crowd embarrassed by its history yet eager to profit from it. A wide pedestrian walkway was installed. The line of Indian bars along South Franklin Street was replaced by gift shop, gift shop, gift shop, gift shop, trafficking in Made-in-China T-shirts, mukluks, and cute little stuffed porcupines and otters.

Residents became extras in a tourist show. A busload of cotton tops (as the oldsters were called) once stopped for fifteen minutes to take pictures of me throwing sticks into a pond for my dog to fetch. It was my first experience with the big-time travel industry. Only I hadn’t gone anywhere. Big-time travel had come to me.

Juneau’s hardscrabble personality was swept out to sea by a relentless tide of packaged tourism. Locals fled downtown in summer. Tourists were helicoptered to the top of the once-hazardous Mendenhall Glacier. The final blow: the original Red Dog Saloon, with its narrow layout, sawdust floor, and snowshoes crisscrossed above the bar became such a hit with tourists that they closed it down and opened a big, Disneyfied version down the block. Like most locals, Randy and I sniffed around the new place a few times before swearing it off for good. Not that we had warm memories of the guy, but a Red Dog where our New Year’s Eve Viking would be out of place was a Red Dog we wanted no part of.

Despite three decades of steady commodification, the media continues to push the myth of Juneau as an edge-of-the-world destination for hearty adventure seekers of the Jack London variety. A 2006 travel story in the Wall Street Journal reassuringly labeled the capital of one of the wealthiest states in the Union as “Off the Beaten Track.” I resisted the urge to drop the editors a note letting them know that during what the Juneau Convention & Visitors Bureau press kit defines as the official five-month tourist season from May to September, Juneau now receives around a million visitors. That’s roughly sixty-five hundred tourists a day, 90 percent of whom travel to Off the Beaten Track Juneau on luxury cruise ships and whose presence turns downtown into a pedestrian mall of trinkets, tram rides, and local microbrew for nearly half the year.

I can’t claim innocence. Stuffing posters in mailing tubes and hamming it up for shutterbugs was only the beginning of my complicity. Sooner than I would have thought, I was giving away “locals only” hiking secrets to readers of The Atlantic. Selling out hidden paddling opportunities to National Geographic Adventure. Revealing authentic, hole-in-the-wall fishermen’s bars for Maxim and Esquire drinkers. Praising the glories of various natural wonders in the pages of Alaska Airlines’ in-flight magazine. With Zero fighters and Betty bombers, the Japanese had managed to take only the Alaskan islands of Attu and Kiska during World War II—the travel industry’s swift conquest of the state proved once again the inability of the sword to match the power of the pen.

 

Most of my travel at the time was limited to boat trips around Southeast Alaska. This made Randy, whom we called MacGyver for his uncanny ability to improvise a fast solution to almost any problem, an invaluable sidekick.

On one fishing trip, drifting perilously in a fourteen-foot dinghy with an engine that wouldn’t start, Randy and I paddled to a nearby island where I watched him disassemble our eight-horsepower Johnson outboard with his bare hands and only his pocketknife for a tool as a cold night closed in. With less fanfare than you’d use to make toast in the morning, Randy soon had the engine spread in dozens of horrifying pieces across the rocky beach. The shear pin that protects the drive shaft and holds the flywheel in place—thus allowing it to spin and propel us back to civilization—had caught on something and shattered into sickening little bits. As soon as Randy shoved the handful of black shrapnel in my face, I imagined the fat dude in greasy overalls eyeing the pieces across the counter at Alaska Ship Chandlers marine supply.

“They make that little fucker in Taiwan. Part ships through Hong Kong. Six weeks minimum to get here.”

I took the news hard, dropping down on a log and massaging my temples. Randy immediately ran through his impressive catalog of frontier obscenities, yanked out the thin metal handle of our water jug, grabbed a rock, banged out a stubby replacement pin, slid it in place, put the whole motor back together, and crossed his fingers. The engine roared to life on the first pull and didn’t stop till we got to the harbor at Auke Bay.

The whole operation had taken about six hours, but we slept in our beds that night. I’ve watched Filipino mechanics patch car tires with Super Glue and banana leaves and seen two-story houses in Brazil built entirely of scrap metal. But disassembling an outboard motor, crafting a replacement part, then reassembling the motor, entirely by hand, remains the most amazing feat of resourcefulness I’ve ever witnessed. If Randy was a rare bird in Alaska then, he’s an endangered species now.

 

After tourism replaced real Alaska with “Alaskana,” petroleum firebombed the whole package in 1982. With statehood established in 1959, Alaska had settled into a decade of relative oblivion. Then oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay in 1968. The crusty territorial guys saw what was coming. Senator John Butrovich, born in a mining camp in Fairbanks in 1910, rattled his fist at the legislature in 1969 about the treachery of Big Oil.

“The majors are going to own the whole damn state,” he warned. “The majors will own you. They have no souls—robber barons don’t change.”

Little more than a decade later, 1982, with Alaska dripping in crude, the first Permanent Fund Dividend checks were issued by the state government to all Alaskans—$1,000 given away to each of the state’s 550,043 lucky residents, every penny based on investments made with oil revenues. A pittance for corporate oil even then, but a $6,000 payout for families with four kids, like mine, was big money. Some call the Permanent Fund Dividends pseudosocialism, but the truth is less complex: they’re a bribe. Alaska’s once-liberal voters haven’t sent a non-Republican to Washington since the day that first check was issued.

Alaska today isn’t so much a GOP stronghold as it is an oil fiefdom. Having bought the state in 1982, the oil biz to this day continues its annual payoffs to Alaskans. By 2006, the annual PFD check issued to residents was up to $1,107. Never mind that the prevailing local mythology remains one of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism, the importance of independence myths is inversely proportional to the degree to which any society has surrendered its sovereignty. Oil now makes 80 percent of the state’s income and 100 percent of its important decisions.

As luck would have it, 1982 was not only the year Big Oil purchased the state’s soul, it was also the year I arrived at the Alaska House of Representatives, first as a lowly page, then assistant sergeant at arms. An eighteen-year-old who barely dragged himself through high school sitting at the head of the House chambers consulting Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedure and raking in thirty-six thousand dollars a year? For those who haven’t seen it firsthand, that’s what an oil boom looks like.

Among our forty reps that year, there still roamed a few leftover coots from the fishing towns and radical loonies from the bush who kept bottles of Old Crow stashed in their desks in the House chambers. The guys I liked most were the Libertarians from Fairbanks, Dick Randolph and Ken Fanning. Randolph drove the page staff crazy by clipping his nails on the House floor, and Fanning, to borrow the description of local admirer and reporter Joe LaRocca, “suffered from the opposite of charisma.” But both could rail like drunken Baptists against the Anchorage lawyers running the show and entertain the visitors gallery by pointing out the lies behind the topics of day. Alaskans don’t vote for Libertarians much anymore, either.

Dismissed as lefty weirdos by the mainstream, the naysayers, and for that matter the handful of remaining Republican and Democratic independent spirits, didn’t seem so much like politicians to me as they did Alaskans. And in the year when Alaska lost its innocence for good, it was easy to tell the difference. Politicians in the capitol did cocaine. Alaskans in the capitol did cocaine. But it was the politicians who made you pay for it, one way or the other.

 

Having withstood the seduction of illegal narcotics through my formative years—the offerings of slobbery joints from high school guys in sodden wool jackets might not count as seduction, but, still, an element of temptation was at work—I decided one evening for no apparent reason to ingest endless lines of cocaine. My initiation came in the living room of a young legislative aide at a party crowded with pages, aides, lawyers, lobbyists, and at least one government figure well known for publicly stumping for legislation facilitating the ease of resource development.

A guy named J. P. Carrow brought me to the party. J.P. was from Fairbanks, a year older than me. He’d come to Juneau to work in the State Senate. As a favor to an obscure friend of an obscure friend, my father agreed to let him board in my older brother’s vacant room through the winter session. As I was in the process of temporarily dropping out of high school, and he’d recently struggled through the end of his senior year, J.P. and I became fast friends.

Smart, clean cut, good-looking—if I saw J.P. for the first time today I’d think of him as a frat boy, though at the time I was unfamiliar with the term. Behind the side part and aftershave, J.P. betrayed signs of a secret life. A couple weeks after his arrival, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a series of urgent taps. Mom spoke through my bedroom door.

“Get up and check on J.P. He’s in the hall bathroom.”

Four in the morning and the faucet running full blast. No sense knocking. I shoved open the door and found J.P. in the tub, one leg draped over the edge, deader drunk than a Subic sailor on shore leave. Not an unusual condition in our house given my older brother’s résumé, except that floating on top of the bathwater was a golden carpet of potato-curry vomit. It must have been there a while, because a little breakaway republic of chicken and carrots had pooled around the faucet and clogged the safety drain. Chowdery bathwater was gushing over the gunwales. A half inch already covered the tile floor.

J.P. was back in top form the night of the party with the well-known government figure, which took place in one of the brightly painted, quasi-Victorian houses that dot the side of Mount Juneau and make postcards of downtown such a hit with tourists. Tom Petty might have been on the stereo, and somebody’d been host enough to put a plate of smoked salmon on the dining room table, but what I remember most is how much coke we snorted and how little effect it had on me. I sucked down someone’s expensive Peruvian flake all night long, more than I’ve ever done in a single sitting since. And nothing. On the way home I told J.P. the experience only confirmed my lifelong policy of abstinence. Drugs apparently made you so stupid that you spent tons of money on shit that didn’t even work.

First-timer immunity is, of course, a common enough if inscrutable phenomenon. I had better fortune the following year when I landed my own job with the Alaska House of Representatives. My coke cherry broken, I didn’t see any point in turning down the neighborly lines on offer from the young legislative aide from the interior who knew a lot about music and spent much of his time in the fifth-floor supply closet. Then came offers from the staff in the legislators’ lounge. Handouts from stringers in the media room. Bumps from the secretary in the junior representative’s antechamber. Spoonfuls at the party where…

Turned out, this stuff was pretty damn fun. New friends. Barrel of laughs. Coke made me smart. I didn’t turn into a crackhead and I did plenty more than jam rolled-up twenties into my nose during my time working among the state’s dealmakers. But the inescapable vice in the capitol was a big enough part of life there to forever color my political views. And temporarily make my personal life a little more interesting.

The coke I did that year was always purchased by someone else. All I had to do, when not graciously accepting freebies, was chip in $50 or $75 here and there. Most people didn’t even accept it. Then came the day that Randy called to tell me he was coming back into town after fishing all summer out of Pelican. The occasion called for something special.

The friendliest dealer I knew was a recent import from Los Angeles named Rob, a beefy, jheri-curled black guy who wore dark glasses indoors and talked out of whichever side of his mouth the Camel nonfilter wasn’t dangling from. He always greeted me with a “solid” handshake and added several baritone vowels to my name: “Chuuuuuk. What up, brutha?” Maybe thirty years old. If you remember the old ballplayer Mitchell Paige, you’re 90 percent there.

As one of Juneau’s handful of African Americans, Rob was affectionately known as “Rabdul,” a brotherly rendering of his name in the grand tradition of it-isn’t-racist-it’s-funny racism. Rabdul didn’t seem to mind. He played along, even called himself Rabdul, though whether this was out of good humor or self-preservation in snow-white Alaska I don’t care now to speculate.

Rabdul had always been amiable and generous with me, but it goes without saying that by necessity all drug dealers cultivate a mean streak. Or, rather, it should go without saying. I didn’t grasp the concept until the night of my one and only independent coke purchase, a shifty, loitering affair that went down in front of Pizzazz pizza parlor in the Nugget Mall. (A substandard mall very much like the substandard mall in most small towns, only way shittier.) Pizzazz was just down from the make-your-own T-shirt shop, the place that rigged out Juneauites with such classy silk screens as “Makin’ Bacon” (pigs fucking) and “Haulin’ Ass” (bed of a Chevy half-ton filled with oiled, teenage-girl buttocks). The “Fuck Iran” baseball shirt they sold me once got me kicked out of a high school basketball game.

Oblivious to my intense paranoia, Rabdul accepted my $120—going Alaska rate for a gram in those days—and artfully passed me a small bulge of powder concealed inside a paper triangle made out of a Playboy centerfold, another standard of the day. By God’s benevolent mercy, no bystanders moved in for a citizen’s arrest. Winston Churchill once said nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. Completing a public drug transaction without being arrested must run a close third, after that and finding out your girlfriend’s not pregnant after all.

On a clear summer evening, no city in the country surpasses Juneau for scenic glory. Pinkish hue glowing on snow-capped mountains. Spruce-covered hillsides in a thousand shades of green. Running lights from fishing boats reflecting off flat calm water. Northern lights if you’re lucky. I don’t want to say a coked-up haze makes it all even more magnificent—how depressing would that be?—but I know that night Randy and I never felt so lucky to be alive, Alaskan, and holding.

We met at the harbor at around eleven, just as the sun was melting into an orangey horizon, and drove my beater Ford Torino to all our favorite spots. We checked out eagle trees; cut long straight lines on a vanity mirror held low between the car seats; threw rocks into the ocean at Sandy Beach; pinched one nostril and hoovered acres of spotless powder; scoped out the scene at Skater’s Cabin; used scrupulous fingertips to rub anesthetizing snow dust across our gums; poked sticks into the embers of a beach fire while orcas leaped offshore; savored the bitter flavor of coke snot draining down our throats; and had our boners massively harshed when we unfolded Miss July to find all our happy flake gone, me having licked the page clean two minutes earlier. Given that the best time to do cocaine is after massive amounts of it have already been done, Randy and I were instantly united behind a single purpose. More blow.

Rabdul lived in a shit brown, single-wide trailer in a swampy development a few miles from downtown called Lemon Creek, a name careful readers will recall being shared by the maximum-security prison from chapter 1. I dimly remember some brief discussion about the wisdom of making an unannounced house call on a drug dealer at three thirty in the morning. But Rabdul had always been cool with me, and I knew he kept odd hours, so I figured he’d be OK with it. When we pulled up to the trailer, Randy stayed in the car, proving that at least one of us wasn’t completely out of his mind.

I tapped on the front door. When no one answered, I moved down the length of the trailer, casual as the cable guy looking for a good place to bring in the wire. Stopping where it looked like the bedroom might be, I rapped a little more firmly on the aluminum planking of the trailer and whispered into the night.

“Rabdul? It’s Chuck. Um, you up? I’m out here with Randy. We really need some more shit. Another gram’d be cool. We’ve only got sixty-five dollars on us, but I can get you the rest tomorrow.”

A light clicked on across the street.

It’s possible my voice carried slightly farther than I’d intended. Randy later compared it to the screeching of ravens at the city dump. What was I doing outside a coke dealer’s trailer trying to swing a deal on blow at three thirty in the morning? It’s difficult now to say. Easiest to fall back on the usual excuses of youthful indiscretion, note my limited experience with black guys from L.A. who wore dark glasses indoors, and attest to the sinister grip that drugs can have on even the most late-blooming experimenter.

My last seconds of utter naïveté on this earth were shattered by a vinyl trailer door swinging open with such violence that it seemed to have been ripped backward off its hinges. Rabdul appeared on the front porch—really just some unfinished two-by-four stairs—wearing nothing but a pair of tighty whiteys. His bare feet were planted shoulder width. Resting on his hip at a forty-five-degree angle was a deer rifle with a scope mounted atop its long, cold, black barrel. This was the first time I’d ever seen Rabdul without dark glasses and a cigarette, and at first all I could think was how paunchy he looked with no shirt. I’d later record this among my earliest encounters with what British author John Fowles called “the mystery of other human lives,” solid indication of how frighteningly out of touch I was with situational reality at age nineteen.

Randy later said Rabdul fired a warning shot as he stepped outside, but I never heard one. What I do recall is the absolute terror that wrenched my bowels as Rabdul raised the scope to his eye and dipped the rifle barrel directly below my belt. Not at all the reception I’d had in mind. Rabdul’s anger shot like a flamethrower as I backpedaled to the car. The world hadn’t yet heard of Samuel L. Jackson, but I was getting a preview.

“Asshole! Get the fuck away from my house! Get the fuck away from my family!” (Rabdul had a family?) “Never come the fuck back here again! Never call me the fuck again! Never talk to me the fuck again! Never even think the fuck about me ag—Did you not fucking hear me? Get the fuck away from my house before I kill you!”

I sprinted the last ten yards and fired up the Torino, but my hands were shaking so badly I had to pull over as soon as we got around the corner. For a long time we sat in silence, watching the sun come up low on the horizon. Across the front seat, Randy stared glassy-eyed through the dirty windshield, not moving a muscle. It seemed like a good time to get the fuck out of town.