subconscious bad-ass twanguitar intro.....
I'm gonna drive all night
Take some speed
I'm gonna wait for the sun
To shine down on me...
It was nearly dawn when we crossed the great
Mississippi into
Minnesota. We sat and smoked and bumped
no doz/
ritalin powdermelange madness off an aluminum
picnic table. The late May air was beautiful and sweet, cool and perfect for amplifying the charging sound of the river. The plan for the first day of our Philly-to-LA-one-way
roadtrip had been Philadelphia to Chicago.
They got some money out there
They're giving it away
My old high-school buddy Nick was moving to
the weatherless land to a beautiful apartment on
Rodeo Drive which he'd never seen- to live with
people he'd never met- to work for a man who'd been his film professor at
Princeton- to try to
Make It. Nick's father hadn't wanted him to take the trip alone, and the man said that if I'd go with him, he'd pay for my ticket home once we got out there and Nick got his shit in order.
I'm gonna do what I want
And I'm gonna get paid...
I'd only had two days to get ready, but I wasn't taking much with me. We had a goal, and
we had a plan, and by God we had a
big fucking road atlas. We sketched a route out that went something like
Philly,
Pittsburgh,
Chicago,
Minneapolis,
Souix Falls,
The Badlands and
Rapid City,
Mount Rushmore,
Devils Tower,
Sheridan,
Salt Lake City,
Bryce Canyon,
Zion,
Las Vegas, and into
Los Angeles. We had thought Chicago would be a good place to stop for the night.
No fucking go.
When we rolled into
the windy city at midnight, nearly thirteen hours after leaving
Wilmington, the behemoth of
Chicago was terrifying. A giant
flaming tentacle of electric light overtowered by
a great black horned beast. We stopped long enough to piss and get gas, and give a dollar to the
heroinzombie that "washed" our
windshield while we got gas with what appeared to be
a bucket of urine and a bloody rag. Suddenly we realized that we'd never before understood the concept of "
bad vibrations." That night Chicago was full of them. That had been midnight. By the time we hit
Madison and got
coffee to wash down the
adderall, we were deeply in the clutches of a roadbrain
second wind. No point in stopping when you're too busy hitting a peak.
Well I'm goin' out west
Where the wind blows tall...
So here it was, dawn, and we'd come nearly 1200 miles. We couldn't stop here for very long.
We'd come too far to stop. Nick got out the map. We had that mammoth atlas, but so far we'd only been looking at the two-page map of the whole U.S. We'd stuck to major
highways. That was fine for travel in the east, but we knew that by the time we hit Dakota we'd need a little more detail.
"Look," Nick said, "if we can make it to Rapid City, we can fold over the whole first half of the map. We'll have driven
halfway across the country at a shot."
I think
the man once said "
Anything worth doing is worth doing right." 1650 miles. 2661 kilometers. No sleep. If we got pulled over in our state, we'd probably be in trouble- our pupils were approximately
small enough for angels to dance on, and neither of us could keep our hands from
shaking. We could make it.
...Well my parole officer
Will be proud of me
With my Olds 88
And the devil on a leash
My Olds 88
And the devil on a leash...
italicized lyrics by Tom Waits from the song "Goin' Out West" on the album Bone Machine