Still driving, waiting for the dawn. “Sleepwalk”—any version, the original by Santo and Johnny or the one by the Ventures playing now—is like a three-minute history of all the world’s sadness, without any words to get in the way or fuck up the groove.
I stop at the Fourth Coast for more coffee. The NA and AA dudes are out in full effect, chain-smoking, playing checkers, chess and D&D, looking shell-shocked and kind. There’s a few punks too, ’70s throwbacks with black leather and liberty spikes and Exploited tattoos. I order a Walk the Plank—a large coffee mixed with three shots of espresso—and sit at the counter sifting through a pile of free weeklies. A few seats over is a bearded guy in more or less constant motion. He’s wearing a safari hat and sunglasses. “Hey buddy,” he says. “Yeah, you. You a shitter-hitter?”
“Am I a what now?”
“A shitter-hitter. You like the ass?”
I think for a moment as he rocks madly in his chair. “You know, I really do,” I say. “I like the ass.”
“My man.” He grins and raises a hand for a high five. I sip the Walk the Plank till it cools, then guzzle it and order another. The clock over there over the bathroom door tells me it’s almost three. There was a little part of my shirt I hadn’t sweated through yet. Not anymore. Either that guy or me gets the gold medal for shaking to death.
SEARCHING FOR A LITTLE DEBBIE Fudge Round. The AceHi party story is closed. All I can do is motor down Westnedge to the Meijer’s Thrifty Acres in Portage. Every light is blinking yellow. It’s all just strip malls out this way, feeding into the Crossroads, the really big mall, like rivers into the ocean. Ah but Meijer’s. Glowing as brightly as a nuclear blast. The mechanical doors part, the AC hits like an answered prayer.
This place is so fucking huge it’s a fucking biosphere. It’s where you come if you want all in one trip oil for your car and socks and cold cuts and tennis shoes and potato chips and a Yes, There Really Is a Kalamazoo! T-shirt and a Stephen King book and Comet.
Or else it’s four in the morning and you’re driving around stoned on defeat and caffeine, squirting sweat like your pores are little microscopic turkey basters and all the nerves in your body are alive and screaming and you just want a fucking fudge round.
Walking toward the snack cakes.
Motherfuck the moon and New York City.
Now wait just a goddamn minute here. There’s way too many of these bitches. This is worse than the cereal aisle.
Star Crunch?
No!
Oatmeal cream pie?
No!
Stick to the plan, baby. I pay for the fudge rounds and leave.
BACK ON THE HIGHWAY, I-94 headed west. Hit some wayout, nowhere exit, turn around, now it’s east. We’re really pushing the Subaru here, it’s topping out around 70 mph and shit starts rattling. The steering wheel, the dashboard, the fudge rounds, my teeth.
These fudge rounds are good. I’ve killed about half the box.
I am driving straight at the sunrise. Another day with these hands and this face, what a pisser. I pull off in Battle Creek and park at a McDonald’s and watch the early morning drive-thru breakfast crowd. Goddamn it, I want a sausage McMuffin too.
Heaven is fried.
I put the car in gear and drive away from the sunrise, back into the night.
YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE BUT YOU ARE. You should feel guilty but you don’t. You should turn around now and drive away and let it be something you do not regret because it did not happen, a bad idea that died before you did.
Chateau Acres burning in the clean morning sun.
33 Mangrove Way is way in the back, the next-to-last trailer before a drop-off and a low valley filled with pools of cotton-colored mist. I knock lightly at the screen door till a skinny bedhead kid in a Pistons back-to-back championships T-shirt answers.
“Hi. Good morning. Thought you were a Bulls fan.”
“I am,” he says, rubbing his face with both hands.
“Is your sister home?”
“Yeah. Who’re you?”
“I’m, wow, just tell her it’s Old Bull Lee.”
A minute later Helene appears. She steps outside, blinking, wiping her eyes. “Vim?” she says, her voice low, full of sleep.
“Hey now. How are you?”
“Fine. What are you doing here?”
“I was just . . . you wanna get some breakfast or something?”
“You know what time it is, right?”
“Yes I do.”
“It’s seven in the morning.”
“Yes I know.”
Finally she wakes up enough to really see me. “Are you all right?” she says.
“Me? Yeah. I’m as right as the mail.”
“Have you slept yet?”
“You mean ever in my life?”
“You gotta... you should go,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because. My mom’ll be home soon.”
“I was kinda hoping we could talk.”
“We can’t.”
“Just talk, is all I wanna do, I’m . . .”
I can’t finish. I don’t know what I want to say or even how to use my mouth to say it. I feel empty in the center. I feel floating. Helene is speaking with what looks from way back in here in my head like some degree of urgency. I tell her I only want to talk. I tell her hey you know it’s funny what you said about god the murderer.
Funny because it’s true.
She is saying something about what the hell am I saying. “Leave,” she’s saying, “you gotta trust me on this one and please . . .”
“In a minute,” I tell her. I tell her all I want in the world this second is to talk.
I reach out to touch her and she moves back against the screen door. I only wanted to touch her arm. I know you know what I mean. I only wanted to talk.
“No Vim please you have to go away right now.”
I just want to sit. I want a glass of water. I want to be home already in my bed sleeping and not have to drive there. I want to go down very deeply and dream and watch you dance and writhe.
A pale form materializes behind the screen to Helene’s right. The door creaks open. It’s Bixby Wheeler, wearing only sweat-pants. There are deep red hickeys on his chest and stomach. “Vim?” he says. His voice too is weak with sleep.
“Yes Wheeler. It is I. How are you?”
“What are you doing here?” He looks at Helene. “What is he doing here?”
She shrugs sadly. “He got here a minute ago. I really don’t know.”
“Is everything okay?” Wheeler asks.
“No well I mean everything’s all a little bit fucked up but I was... on my police scanner earlier it’s a... new hobby of mine and lo and behold what do I suddenly hear about you now but a gas leak out this way. But things look... pretty okay.”
A curtain flutters in one of the windows. Helene’s brother. I turn away and Wheeler calls after me and then I’m falling and then I’m on the ground, looking up at the big blue sky. “Whoa. Watch out for that flower pot,” I say. “There aren’t even any fucking flowers in it. Did everybody have a good shit today?”
Wheeler bends over. “Come on, man, lemme help.”
“No! Get off ! Get away from me with your hickeys!”
“They’re not hickeys. They’re love marks,” he says. And the thing about it that crushes my heart is he’s being totally sincere.
Now I’m standing again, backing away and stumbling with my arms up and spread in the air like Dracula raising an invisible cape. “So. What’s happening now?”
Helene opens the door. She steps inside and then back out. Her brother comes out and they all three look at me with weird dumb faces and I’m shouting:
“What’s happening now!”
Wheeler rushes toward me, a finger pressed to his lips.
“Vim man come on keep it down.”
I spin away and tumble backward onto the hood of my car. I scream:
“WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW!”
Wheeler’s hands flutter all around, Helene is sideways in my vision, her brother looks at me like I’m something growing in a petri dish at school. I’m panting, coughing. Now there is no one, they all went inside. Still I’m screaming it over and over:
“WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW!”
Next door an old woman comes out of her trailer. She looks at me as she lights a long white-filtered cigarette. She’s wearing some big flowing flowery nightgown thing. I roll off my car and fall back to the ground and stare up into her face.
“Hi,” I say. “What’s happening now?”
The woman blinks, takes a few puffs of her cigarette. “I don’t know, Sonny. Suppose’n you tell me.”