We agreed that if Blonde Hair drank one whiskey shot an hour he couldn’t get a DUI. And we held to this policy for the first hour, only fudging the interval by fifteen minutes in the second. By the third, we debated whether pairing the whiskey with cocaine diminished or increased one’s BAC. At some point during the fourth hour, the three of us consumed a liter of Canadian Club and three bottles of champagne and had difficulty telling the difference between lanes on the road much less hours in the day.
“Only drunks drink that shit straight,” Blonde Hair told Black Hair as he tore the foil off another champagne bottle with one hand and steadied the steering wheel with the other.
“I have to get to the party,” I told Black Hair. My face felt flush. I kept checking my cheeks and forehead for fever.
“We should keep to one shot an hour,” Black Hair said. “I don’t want to be stuck overnight in Jersey.”
They were hippies I think. Or libertarians. Something. I had met them before, and they had told me their names. But I had forgotten them. The people I had come up with left in middle of the night, sick and tired of New York. Dan had broken a chair at the first apartment. Stacey had been bored. She never liked being far from home. Will’s nose started bleeding. I stayed on with these two, friends of Will, or his cousins, until we blacked out at an apartment in Battery Park. We woke up around seven overlooking a giant hole where two towers had been, and left quickly, taking with us all the unopened champagne we could grab and a liquor bottle from the kitchen counter. I don’t know who lived there.
“We need cigarettes,” said Blonde Hair. His hair was not nearly as long and natty as his friend’s, but stringy and unwashed. He had it cut recently though, just around the ears. Black Hair’s neck was a mess of unkempt greasy curls. They spun endlessly around on themselves, and he periodically rubbed his hand through the unctuous wave as if he had fleas.
Blonde Hair spun the wheel expertly. I admired his dexterity, the way in which his hands passed over one another, long fine fingers with perfectly sheared cuticles. Around the roaring semis we maneuvered effortlessly, falling in and out of each lane as if the entire highway’s movement were synchronized. We must have been inches, centimeters away from their massive spinning wheels and yet we never touched. I felt like a juggler’s ball.
“Well, yes, of course,” I agreed. “We need cigarettes. But after the cigarettes we need to get to the party.”
“I can’t drive any faster,” argued Blonde Hair. “You see, if I drive any faster, I’ll be drunk.”
“One shot an hour,” Black Hair said. “You can just tell them you had one shot an hour. They’ll understand.”
“The cops are fascists here. Union fascists.”
The sun beat down lazily on the window, and I dozed. The car was like a cradle, the lane changes long desultory rocks—first one side, then another, back and forth, forth and back.
“You can’t be in a union and be fascist,” said Black Hair.
“Well, of course you can. Unions are fascist. Read a book.”
“Fuck books.”
I interrupted.
“Do I look sick? I think I look sick.”
Black Hair glanced back at me. His lips were thick and his chin drooped—a basset hound with a basset hound’s sad dull eyes. I touched my cheeks again. My fingers grew warm. The champagne was very dry, and each time I put the glass to my lips my throat constricted. We were out of whiskey though, so I tried again and again and hoped for the best.
“You’re not sick. You are definitely not sick. I know sick people.”
Above me strips of headliner fluttered down like confetti. It took all my willpower not to pull at them. Blonde Hair or some previous owner had stapled the sagging roof fabric up and it ballooned down in three distinct parachutes. The fourth balloon had popped during the trip and long strips tore away in the wind, whipping against the seat, into my lips and out the window. If I pulled my head off the window and my back off the sticky leather, my hair would rub against this soft material.
“Why are we stopping?” I asked.
“Cigarettes. We need cigarettes. Cigarettes will help your fever.”
I laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” Black Hair asked.
The green Oldsmobile had pulled into a rest stop and parked between two white trucks. Black Hair and Blonde Hair stumbled out of the doors into the sun toward the service plaza.
“Get me a water,” I yelled through the open window. “I’m sick.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” one of them shouted back.
I felt very alone. The semis glided by, screaming down and up the turnpike, tearing me this way then that way, my torso from my head and my head from my torso. There were so many vehicles, so many shapes and sizes. I rubbed my cheeks again and tasted water in the air.
After about five minutes or maybe twenty, my bladder tightened. I did not listen, focusing instead on everything else, the sun, the sound of my breathing.
They did not come back. The cars and trucks screamed at me.
My bladder tightened again, loudly.
I pushed at the door, brushing the confetti aside, moving toward the golden arches, remarking on the two white trucks, the wide-open sky an indifferent blue.
I could not find the green Oldsmobile. The sun had grown larger by the time I left the restroom, and was now obscured by a fog, a heavy orange incandescence. I walked back toward the white trucks but there were no white trucks. There were other cars, but no trucks. I turned around and went left and then right, the fenders and bumpers brushing against my knees. After many different color cars, I found a green Oldsmobile.
Someone had fixed the headliner. Fabric no longer hung down in my face.
“Excuse me,” said a man in the front seat. The man had a long skinny jaw, two lines that ran all the way down into his neck. His lips moved after the words came into my ears. He had very little hair, and what hair he did have was brown. His eyes were wide as the blue sky.
“I have to get to a party,” I said.
“Are you all right, son?” he asked
“I’m sick,” I told him. I felt he would understand. “I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m going to war.”
The woman in the seat next to him, her eyes rolling lightly, said something to the man. She held another version of her, a miniature thing with the same eyes, nose, and hair. The thing fingered her chin.
“Where are you from, son?” said the man, loudly, too loudly. “Did you say you were in the military? Are you all right?”
“I’m not in the Army yet. I’m going to the Army tomorrow. I start tomorrow. Tonight’s my party,” I explained patiently, slowly, trying to keep my tongue from the words.
“I think you need to go somewhere else,” said the woman, and I turned to her. Her lips had tiny ruts in them where words gurgled.
“We can take you,” said the other one. “Where do you need to go?”
“My party. My war party,” I said.
I looked down at my hands. They had become very heavy, almost as heavy as the warmness in my cheeks. The little thing in her lap gave me an eyeball full of empty liquid. It rolled around and around and I shifted and squirmed so it would not know me.
“Here,” the lines that were a man said, “lie down. We can take you where you need to go.”
“I need to talk to you outside,” said the other one, her split lips red as the ends of her nails. The little thing’s small hand had risen up into her hair. It ran like my hand might have run, caressing downy cheeks. I wanted to put my warm cheeks there next to those warm cheeks and fall asleep underneath all that hair.
“The least we can do,” came through the air, into my head with all my other thoughts.
Through the windshield, I watched them move their hands and mouths. She pointed at the building, and then her thumb at the car. Her eyes rolled and rolled. The little thing grabbed at her hand.
I shifted my feet against the seat, and wondered if they had cigarettes. They did not look like the kind of people who had cigarettes. There were only stuffed animals next to my feet. I would push them and they would stay clinging to my foot. They would not roll away. They had eyes and mouths and ears stitched to their bodies.
Through the windshield, the man kept on nodding his head, as if to say, yes, I understand, of course I understand, but we have a certain responsibility. We have to do something.
“No you don’t,” I said to the stuffed animals.
My forehead grew warmer, dangerously warm. I was contagious.
Opening the door, I fell out onto the ground, spilling out like water, and the words they shouted at me made no sense. I picked myself up and ran. The bumpers scraped against my knees. Tennessee, New Jersey, Maryland, and Connecticut cut at my jeans, but I did not care. I was not afraid.
A green 1996 Oldsmobile pulled up next to me as the cars disappeared. Black Hair hung out the window, the champagne bottle’s rim peaking over the edge. His eyes were very sad.
“What the fuck, man? Let’s go. We got cigarettes.”
The confetti swayed first this way and that, tickling the back of my neck.
Black Hair apologized when he remembered the water.
“I forgot,” he said, earnestly.
I did not like being away from my friends, from the people I knew, because other people in the world would become sincere for no reason, blindly and dangerously. I lived in fear that someone would hold me accountable for what I said or did or expect me to hold them accountable for what they said or did.
They offered me a joint as a consolation. The tires squealed in the waxy asphalt and I coughed terribly. It poured out my nose.
“I need some sleep,” said Blonde Hair, his delicate fingers cresting over the spinning wheel. “I know my limits.”
I could feel the motor pulsing against my forehead, churning air in one side and out the other, below as above, within as without.
“Road trips are great,” said Black Hair, his hair shinier and moving ever so lightly in the terrible breeze.
“It’s not a road trip if you’re going home.”
“It’s on the road. It’s a road trip.”
“I need to pull over. I need some sleep, maybe.”
“No,” I shouted over the wind. “I need to get to the party.”
I was running high, spinning like a top.
“I have a party tonight. My parents spent a bunch of money. I only get one party. You can’t pull over. We can’t pull over again.”
“I’m really tired.”
I waited for more but that’s all Blonde Hair said.
“You can come to the party too. You can both come to the party.”
“Will they have food?” asked Blonde Hair.
“Of course, they’ll have food. It’s a going-away party.”
He stared down at the empty pint in his lap.
“Where you going?” asked Black Hair suddenly.
“The Army.”
“There’s Army everywhere. I mean there’s like five thousand fucking bases. Global War on Terror means we all signed up for the war. Everyone. You, me. We’re all in. Whether we like it or not.”
He had a point. I could see his point.
“You have a point,” I said, blowing smoke at the strips of felt.
“Can we at least get some more whiskey?” he asked, as if I had a choice in the matter.
“Yeah, I think it’s been an hour,” said Blonde Hair.
“Sure,” I said. “You’re doing me the favor. I don’t see why not. I don’t see how another stop can hurt.”
By the time we were back on the road, the sky had darkened. A storm had blown in from Pennsylvania. Thick drops slapped against the windshield—first a few, then a thousand. You could barely hear the music. I could only hear parts of what Black Hair was telling me. It came to me brokenly from the bottom of a well.
“I don’t believe in war . . . you can kill now but why not later? . . . Why not ever? . . . I respect what you do but I don’t see how it makes the world a better place . . . it’s just bad juju in my opinion.”
“Thank you,” I yelled over the roaring air. “I respect you too.”
I don’t know if he heard me. The conversation broke off when a massive semi with the letter M on the side swung sharply into our lane, spraying gallons of water up through the wheel well and onto our windows. It was like driving through the ocean, through a lake, into the sky, as if someone had just pulled a bag over the car. Blonde Hair yanked the wheel to the left and then back to the right, pulling us into the other lane and what I knew would be my death, the hard smacking, the crumpled plastic, the naked impact I had dreamed of for many years, and yet there was nothing there, just more wet air. The tires squealed, spun water, and again caught pavement just before we hit 90 degrees. We straightened out, never slowing for a moment.
“You son of a bitch,” I whispered. “You son of a bitch.”
Black Hair crawled into the backseat with me. There was something wild in his eyes. He turned toward the rear window, the pint still firmly in his hand, close to me. I could smell its cherry scent and his greasy hair. My hands shook uncontrollably. They danced about my leg until I grabbed the seat belt firmly, pressing it against my fingers until they hurt.
“Jesus Christ. You see that?” Black Hair asked, his eyes far away from mine. “Holy shit, look at the pileup. It’s a massacre back there. It’s a fucking genocide.”
With each passing second the Oldsmobile moved down and away from the giant truck another car slammed into the wall the Oldsmobile had erected, dividing us and them, shifting the monstrous wet squealing dinosaur a little further down the highway toward us. But it would never catch up. It could never catch up with it going as slow as it was. The entire I-95 corridor could slam into that truck and we would still be only further away.
It was unfair. We were taking their movement, the velocity of their collision to propel ourselves forward. But we did not make this world. The cars to the left and the right of us were doing the same. We had so much power, so much energy. And they were nothing at all. Yet this was exactly how it needed to happen. It couldn’t happen any other way than this. This was how they died and this is how we lived.
“Fuck,” said Black Hair, his breath hot with whiskey, closer to my own face than I liked. My hands had not stopped shaking.
“I need to get out of here,” I said. “I need to go away.”
“We are getting out of here. Don’t you see?”
And we were. We were flying. My cheeks were no longer warm. Blonde Hair didn’t look back or speak to us. He briefly adjusted the rearview mirror, lit a cigarette by pulling his face close to the lighter, leaned back, and let out a blast of smoke. The small gap of open window sucked the smoke out.
“Hey, look at that,” Black Hair said, pointing with the half-filled pint, as he collapsed back against the other back passenger door, greasy hair hanging over his ears.
I yanked a felt strip out of the way. The sky was clearing up in front of us, and if you looked hard, if you had the sensitivity to see, you could just make out a spectrum of orange, purple, violet and a pale lovely pink rising up between the pulsing brains of cloud and last crimson sinews of sun.
