Tag: precarious lee (Page 8 of 11)

Bad planning could get you lost, and not keeping your car up might break you down. Bad luck could always get you, and even though Precarious had learned to expect bad luck along the way, it always surprised him when it happened. He didn’t really believe in luck, good or bad, but he liked having something to blame when things broke , so he called it luck. You do everything on the list, you double-check it, and then you try not to fuck it up. After that, you have no say in the matter. Tires blow and engines seize and you’re of the side of the road. But you had to be a complete shithead to run out of gas, Precarious thought.

He would always stop for stranded motorists. It was one of the Rules of the Road, and plus Precarious enjoyed the phrase “stranded motorist” and he would use it in conversation with said stranded motorist, just to make himself smile. If it was someone whose fuel tank had run dry, he would help them, but he wasn’t friendly about it. Not to say he was rude: Precarious was awful at being rude, at least to people he truly didn’t like. He could be wonderfully cruel to his friends–in fact: the closer, the meaner–but if he thought you were an asshole, he would start yelling at you and probably sucker-punch you. Precarious did that a lot when he was younger, and he thinks about it a lot now, and he just dummies up now and takes out his siphon and jerry-can.

Precarious had it to spare; there was gas in his car. Precarious didn’t believe in filling up. He topped off. A gas tank should never be anywhere even close to half-emptied, he thought. What if that zombie invasion the movies were always talking about happened, he would think and smile, and then he would think of other reasons to have always have a full tank. He kept smiling, maybe even harder, but he didn’t at the time. Every once in a while, you have to get across the state line as soon as possible. What’s the point of being on the road without gas, Precarious wondered. Keep the tank full.

He had a thirsty tank this trip out, a 1971 Ford Torino Brougham with the big engine. It was a 429 cubic inch Cobra Jet-R V8 making 370 horsepower, so much American muscle the boys in Detroit had to carve a scoop into the hood so the motor could gulp enough air to throw you down the highway. Precarious wasn’t a Ford fan in particular, but when he drove past this one, he made an offer on the spot. When he got home, he looked through his car magazines and found out the color was named Grabber Blue, and he knew he had made a good choice. It was the right car for Route 77.

Precarious found the on-ramp to 77 in a bar in Tulsa, and sobered it up for a few hours, and then he got on the highway and started cruising with the window, which was massive, down and his arm resting in the sun. It wheeled across the sky, sometimes in his eyes, and sometimes low behind him and in every mirror, and sometimes overhead and out of the way. On Route 77, this might happen within twenty minutes or so, though. Precarious went with it and just adjusted his visor a lot. You knew what the Interstitial was going to be like before you got on, he thought. No use complaining.

Precarious let the Torino take him across the Dodecaborough Bridge, which links the five boroughs of New York, plus seven others from various dimensions, trimensions, and fictions. You can get to the Manhattan you need to escape from, like Snake Plissken, but you shouldn’t. He zipped up the Donner Pass, and then through the Blitzen Pass, where there was also cannibalism, but it was Christmas-themed, which makes it somehow worse. The Keys of Florida and the locks of the Great Lakes disappeared to a point in his rearview mirror in the same afternoon. Here to there in the here and now, Precarious thought about Route 77. Everywhere except Texas. Even on Route 77, it takes forever to get through Texas.

There were farms along the road on the Interstitial, but the tractors ran at night. Precarious didn’t know why he found it so unsettling, but he tried not to look when he passed. Route 77 is impatient, and prefers to get its weather out of the way: sometimes it everythings.  Some of the highway has reflectors, and parts have lights. From time to time, the reflectors will gather themselves into a sphere, and the lights play along, and they have a little disco party. Precarious didn’t begrudge anyone their fun, but it was hell to drive through. No use complaining.

It was dangerous to pass up a gas station on Route 77, as they were semi-permanent. The people working there would deny that the stations had moved, and the maps pegged them right where they were supposed to be, but Precarious knew they moved, goddammit. All the stations were owned by the same company who, for reasons of corporate security, would not reveal its name. The signs just read GAS in white letters against red, and if you got your car washed, you could speculate about the identity of the owners with the other Drivers waiting. Precarious did not keep journals and graphs and charts of his journeys like some of the others he met on Route 77, but he had been writing down all the various theories about the stations’ owners.

A couple people said aliens, which is to be expected, but most of the Drivers had more imagination than that. Two men that Precarious asked claimed that no such gas stations exist, and one was holding a nozzle at the time. Precarious was impressed by that one. A popular theory was that there was only one gas station, not a chain. Precarious at first liked this idea, as he figured it fit with his notion that the stations were roaming all over the damn place, but most proponents insisted that the stations did not in fact move, but were super-positional. Precarious thought that was just crazy.

There was leaded, and unleaded, and diesel, and one of the pumps was dedicated strictly to flamethrower-time. No one got hurt who didn’t deserve it, and Precarious was okay with that. Another pump had a slot machine welded onto it, and you could pull the handle to find out the price of fuel, plus every spin came with a free cup of coffee. There was a little store that sold things no one on the road could ever need–coffee filters, patio furniture, prom dresses–and it was lit as bright as a NASA launchpad the night before take-off. The cashier has been behind the register since Monday, and his eyes are no longer collaborating. The maps are still free on Route 77, but they are wrong. If you want a map that won’t deliberately strand you in the desert to die, it’ll cost you a few bucks.

Precarious knew the Rules of the Road, but they boiled down to this: take care of what you can, and take care of who you can, because the road doesn’t have your best interests at heart. The Interstitial never pretended it was your friend, he thought, and if you didn’t know that before, then you sure as shit should know it by now. You do everything on your list, you double-check it, and then you try not to fuck it up. Precarious didn’t think it was all that difficult, but he’d still pull over for those who found it to be. Maybe “help idiots” was on the list, he figured.

One day, he’d be on the side of the road. You could triple, quadruple, whatever-check your list and Route 77 will check its list and one day they won’t quite match up. There’s always a chance of having a breakdown, Precarious thought as he chocked the nozzle back into the pump and slapped the gas tank hatch close. One day, he’d be on a smoky shoulder, and  searching the horizon for headlights. One day, “one day” would be today, he figured.

The needle on the gas gauge was pinned well past Full, and Precarious loved the way that looked. A full tank equals a known radius of freedom, he would tell people when he was drunk and feeling fancy. The window was still down and he leaned his arm out into the sunshine, and then he squealed the tires, just a little bit, as he got back on Route 77, which is the road to Little Aleppo. It is a hard truck, but God will forgive you the miles.

Somewhere backstage, some time or other, a woman had told Precarious Lee that a journey of thousand miles begins with a single step, and he was noncommittal; he knew it wasn’t true. A journey of a thousand miles begins with finding the proper pair of shoes. And while Precarious knew it was an allegory, he still idly wondered why you would walk a thousand miles. If that’s what your God demands, he thought; his God was right over the horizon, and while Precarious had never explicitly identified his personal deity as American, it was assumed.

But skies darken, and fill, and burst; the road gives way to nature just as a man upon it does. Slowly, cracking and baking and freezing; all at once, washed out and down the hill and never to be seen again. Now you see ’em, now you don’t. Precarious had his maps, dog-eared and notated in his block-letter pencil; there was always a Plan B. The gear wouldn’t fit through the door, or the town ahead was on fire, or there had been a surprise eclipse and all the cows had drowned themselves: these things would happen.

Go around? Hunker down and find a bar, with a motel attached? Precarious always allowed for the option of getting up a head of steam and bulling through a problem; he found it worked more often than you would think. There was no turning back, Precarious always thought. It’s too late to turn back now. Even if he wanted to double back, the turning radius of a 1972 Pontiac Grand Prix was approximately the size of Kansas and it was too much of a hassle. Precarious had tried to do a K-turn the day he picked up the car and given up halfway through; better just to go forward, he figured.

The Grand Prix wasn’t the best car he ever drove: it used the same suspension technology as a Conestoga wagon did, but you could get it with a 455 cubic inch engine that made 300 horsepower, which was enough. Pontiac also used the fact that doors were the longest ever made as a selling point, and that tickled Precarious, and it was available in Cumberland Blue; that sealed the deal. Besides, he didn’t keep cars all that long.

Precarious kept the window rolled down so he could smell the weather; it had to be damn near zero for him to put it up. He never ashed out his window, though, and never ever tossed his butt from the car. Lady Bird Johnson had asked for Americans to help beautify the highways, and Precarious thought that was an excellent idea. He may have had a mild crush on Mrs. Johnson, but that was the sort of thing that got you made fun of backstage. If someone else admitted to it, Precarious leveled with himself, he would make fun of them; he kept his infatuation to himself.

Dammit, Precarious, can’t you sit still? That was his mother, over and over, and years after her death he had an answer: I can sit still as long as I’m moving forward. In a farm town, life progressed by the season. The earth set the pace. The ground told you what to do, and the sky told you when to do it. And when the storms came-and they came, and they came, and they came–you had no exit ramp, and you had no bar with the motel attached, and you had no choice. You sat there and you took it.

Sometimes in conversation, he would let himself embellish his childhood; it wasn’t that bad, though. Outdoors a lot, healthy. Made him strong as hell and taught him how to work, he figured. Sure as shit didn’t sleep til noon like some people he knew. But people belong somewhere, Precarious knew, and sometimes it wasn’t the place they were born. He had an elaborate theory about personality types and geography, how mountain people were different from desert people and so on. Precarious was a road person, and a farm no place for that sort; three months and nine days after his sixteenth birthday, he walked across town to the bus station, stopping to post a letter to his mother.

The windshield was bad news. There were storms, and the radio fizzed and crackled and so did the clouds; Precarious knew the safest place during a lightning storm was in a Pontiac Grand Prix, and he feathered off the gas as he inspected his future. The sky was angry, and Precarious had an uncanny feeling that the anger was specifically directed at him; the hairs on the back of shoulders stood up.

He had skirted the path of Hurricane Beyoncé, which was one of the fiercest to ever hit the Gulf Coast. Gambled and lost outside Iowa City in the spring, and had to shelter from hail the size of pork chops. That’s how two locals described the hail, but Precarious was sure that wasn’t right. Rockslides and landslides and mudslides; once in Colorado, he saw a treeslide. The trees all just fell over. That one worried him a bit.

And there was an exit, there was the off-ramp, there was the way to get home: Route 77, lying out there just like a killer in the sun. Precarious smiled and he gunned the engine; it was a V8 with no turbo-charger so it screamed just as soon as he mashed the gas, and then he remembered the last time he had ducked a storm on 77.

The weather looked iffy, so Precarious got onto the Interstitial. It was nice and smooth, and it was a perfect day: he stayed on 77 until the evening and then merged back onto the more-agreed-upon version of reality; the road was slick, and the wind blew him sideways nearly into the Chevy next to him; refrigerated trucks loaded with malt liquor were swept off bridges, and streaks and bolts and jags of white and yellow broke the sky in half, quarters, eighths. This, Precarious thought, was worse.

He swerved to the right, and made a bulbous u-turn across all the lanes of the road; there was a bar a little ways back, Precarious had noticed; it had a motel attached. The storm would blow over, or he would lose patience with nature’s  meanderings just like he did as when he was sixteen, roll up his window, go through the problem.  The secret to shortcuts, Precarious thought, was knowing when not to take them.

A little bit of weather cannot be avoided on the road. There was rain hitting Precarious Lee’s arm as he drove, but he didn’t mind, and he left the window rolled down.

Route 77 is the road to Little Aleppo; it is a hard truck, but God will reward you for the miles.

This is the shortcut; it’s 50 miles longer, but shaves an hour off your time. There are no billboards, and all the road signs are riddles. Terrible place to get lost, but if you do, there are free public showers every ten miles. No one knows who put them there; no one has ever seen them get cleaned, but they are always sparkling. Locals tell stories about the Night Janitors.

All the hitchhikers are the Buddha.

Only one radio station comes in, but Wolfman Jack is on the air.  Your phone won’t work, and the AC dies; you must roll down your window. Route 77 has an understanding with the sun, though: do not fear burns and melanoma. (For the best that your devices are useless: trying to find the road on Google Maps causes your phone to bite you on your favorite nipple. No one knows what would happen if you looked it up on Apple Maps because no one uses Apple Maps.)

The exit onto 77 is only open to some cars. Hyundai won’t make it. Now, you got yourself a 1971 AMC Matador station wagon, you can come on in. 1987 Buick Grand National will do fine. The guy in the 2011 Ford Fusion has to find a different route.

Precarious found it first. Between tours, he would drive. Sleep in the car in a parking lot, window cracked and pistol between the seats. At dawn, Precarious would say “I’m gonna cross the Mississippi,” and then at dusk he would.

Precarious Lee believed in God, and that He had given us the world. And to show our gratitude to the Lord, Precarious thought, we had built the highways. His grace was in the smoothness of the blacktop, and His protecting hands were the rumble strips and guardrails.

He disagreed with Neal Cassady. Precarious had been a passenger of the Holy Goof’s, and it was a blast, but Neal thought top speed was the right speed, and Precarious did not: Precarious thought the right speed was the right speed. Sure, sometimes the right speed was 100 mph through the middle of the city at noon, but most often the right speed was between 70 and 80, and way the fuck out of town.

Precarious didn’t count the hours, and he didn’t count the miles; he marked his progress by fuel stops.

On the road, he could think. On the road, even better, he could not think. Nothing could be done; the to-do list had been suspended. Precarious saw the road linking here and there as not a bridge, but an entirely third place. An interstate interregnum. The road doesn’t link places, he thought: places bloom from the road.

Others would ask him if he liked to drive because he was his own boss behind the wheel, and Precarious didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about: he was a working man, and had had a boss since he was 14. Sometimes the road was his boss, but it was the best one Precarious had worked for. No nitpicking. Let him do his job like a man.

Precarious Lee was due back at Front Street in 19 hours; he was outside of Galveston in an 1972 International Harvester Scout; Precarious was an optimist, but he could also do math. He had never missed a show. He would never, and he called on the spirit of Lady Bird Johnson:

“Beautify my journey like you beautified this Interstate, Ma’am!”

On the shoulder was a sign. Precarious knew it was a sign because it was square-ish, and green, and on the side of a road. It was also a Sign, and Precarious knew that it was a Sign because it was galloping alongside the car cursing at him in Flemish. That’s odd even for Texas.

The sign pointed to an exit off the highway. It was a jughandle mixed with a cloverleaf plus a high-speed merge out of nowhere and then a hairpin turn for absolutely no reason. Route 77 had an open-door policy, but its door was a lethal weapon: if you were meant to drive the road, then you would.

The Scout ate up the road; the odometer spun wildly, and the clock froze; Precarious Lee raced the clouds across America. Another gas station, another film of dead bugs, another piss. Precarious was making great time.

He wasn’t the first one at the warehouse to load the trucks, but he wasn’t the last one. The Scout’s engine seized in the parking lot, and Mickey made drums out of it years later. His back was screaming and his eyeballs danced like popcorn kernels in their moment of becoming, but he got to work. Precarious Lee didn’t miss shows.

Route 77 is a hard truck, but God will reward you for the miles.