The Rules of the Road, page 9
* * *
Anyhow, where was I? Ah yes, I was talking about the importance of standing still on this special early morning edition of “The Rules of the Road.” Them good ol’ boys down south knew the importance of stopping and smelling the roses. They knew you had to slow down every once in a while and take your time. That’s why they never got in a hurry with the song “Free Bird.” You know it’s a very long song.
Why yes, I am talking about the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Good bunch of guys. They give me a personal show every now and then and haven’t missed a beat (even though the fella in charge of refueling their plane did). That’s where today’s “Rule of the Road” comes in. If at any point during your journey, you hear the song “Free Bird”, you must listen to it in its entirety. It is imperative that you do so—the whole thing—I’m talking guitar solo and outro and everything until fade out.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Buck, I’m a very busy man and my schedule is packed, and I mean packed to the gills. I gotta work my 9-5, but before that I gotta get up at 6 in the morning, so I can practice my Bulgarian throat singing and milk the goats, and then I have to get my case assignment finished in time so Jenkins doesn’t jump all over my hiney, the little twerp. After working my fingers to blood and pulp at the grindstone, I gotta take little Timmy to soccer practice and then have dinner with the family and then massage the little miss’s footsies. My, how those things have looked gnarly lately, and I mean rougher than sandpaper, but I don’t know how to tell her. And then I gotta hit the hay, out like a light, only to wake up and do it all over again. I don’t have time to listen to no song that has a three-minute guitar solo. Time is money and three minutes might as well be a thousand smackers.”
And to that I say, “Fair enough.” If you don’t have time to finish “Free Bird,” then you won’t have time to finish anything else. You’ll never finish another deal again. Ignore this rule at your own peril.
Welp, that’s all I got for this morning. I hope the coffee is hitting you just right, and the sun is shining bright and that California dreaming doesn’t turn into any sort of California nightmare. y'all have a good one now. Stay safe. Stay lively. Stay lonely. I’m Buck Hensley, and these are “The Rules of the Road.”
The stereo shut off and silence filled my car, soon to be followed by honking from behind me. I’d been staring at the passenger seat floorboards and when I looked up, the traffic before me was moving steadily.
I took the next exit and called to cancel my appointment, went home and took a couple Valiums and nursed gin and tonics until I passed out.
Life carried on for the next few weeks without a hitch. Work consumed and distracted me, mostly.
I called my mom. It had been months. The weird stuff had brought her to my mind. She had landed well after the death of my dead, had remarried and was retired and living her best life with my stepdad in Florida.
I checked the Joe Rogan Podcast episode list and saw nothing untoward. I thought about listening to the most recent episode again to see if he said anything about me, but when I heard his voice I got sick to my stomach.
I got to thinking about what I had heard that day in the car and chalked it up to suppressed memories from my unresolved childhood trauma.
I asked some of my friends and colleagues about their go-to shrinks and got a laundry list of names and recommendations, doctors who would prescribe the best drugs, spiritual gurus who would align my chakras, marijuana dispensaries that sold healing strains, and a gal in West Hollywood who could perform what was known as a “trauma colonic.”
The weeks passed without incident. I buried myself in work. I made conference calls, attended business lunches, scoped out properties, and sealed a few deals.
Maybe this was all a midlife crisis, a sort of sign that I should reassess my place in the universe and how I was living. How long could I go on like this, making money hand over fist, a new girl every few weeks? Wasn't there a sort of emptiness to it all?
These thoughts usually evaporated pretty easily when I hugged the curves of Mulholland in my beloved Porsche. Nothing like 350 horsepower to throw you back into your seat and erase all your self-doubt.
So, in lieu of a trauma colonic or talking about my childhood to some stranger, I got in my Porsche and took off. The windows were down, and the air was clear. I drove past rows of palms and strip malls and parking lots and little Mexican grocery stores and fast-food restaurants and homeless encampments, all the while keeping my eye out for places that would appreciate in value. The next big thing.
I took Fairfax north and turned west on Hollywood, heading toward Laurel Canyon, with its winding roads and seclusion and where hippies once lived and partied and recorded some fine music. Now it was full of million-dollar homes, all thanks to the likes of people like yours truly.
I was feeling good, and I absentmindedly turned the satellite radio on. It had been a while since I drove out this way and I wanted to match the scene with that 70s Laurel Canyon sound. That’s when I heard it, that familiar opening.
It starts with a Hammond B3 organ, these pleasant-sounding drones. Then the drums kick in and shortly after the slide guitar comes roaring out in front of the mix playing that telltale riff. This is followed shortly by those opening lines about the hypothetical leaving.
I mean, we all know the song, and if you don’t, then I suppose I envy you for getting to experience this American masterpiece for the first time with fresh ears. It’s been overplayed for the rest of us.
I instantly thought of “The Rules of the Road” when I heard it coming on and I cranked up the volume. It had been a long time since I had paid attention and actually listened to the song in its entirety. I vowed to finish the whole thing. What did I have to lose?
For the briefest instant, I closed my eyes during the guitar solo and played a little air guitar on my steering wheel. Eyes open or not, it wouldn’t have changed what happened next. It would have only allowed me an extra nanosecond to flinch at the inevitable collision with the truck that had pulled out in front of me as I topped the hill.
The Porsche was totaled, and I was rattled and whiplashed, but not severely injured. I took a few days off to rest and recover and allow my black eye and swollen face to look more presentable. A contract I was close to closing on got Hoovered up by a competing firm with a better offer. Even though I would spend the next couple months trying to work and function and get back to the peak of what I was, that was the closest I would ever get to finishing a deal again.
There was something different about her. She wasn’t a model or an aspiring actress. She had already made it, was a producer for Universal Studios. In a way, she was into speculations like me, weighing risks and rewards for the maximum payoff for the studios. She was responsible for finding the right projects for the studio, turning blank into bank.
We hit it off, and it was clear from the start that this was going to differ from any of my other more recent flings. We took things slowly, and that was fine with me. I enjoyed her company and actually having conversations and dinner and drinks with her. It was fun to let the sexual tension just build for once, send each other flirtatious texts throughout the day. I had missed this kind of relationship, one that was more than sex.
Everything built to a crescendo after a dinner at Spago (which in hindsight, I didn’t finish) and winding up back at her place. The little black dress she wore, the straps over her shoulders, the kissing in the foyer, the curve of her calf as she bent her leg and pulled her heels off, our clothes littering the hallway to her bedroom. There we were, on her bed. She was topless and on her knees while I lay back and admired her. The way her hair cascaded over her breasts, her hips flaring out like the bottom of a vase, her thighs touching and the line between them leading to the V of her mound. I was raring to go, and her visage in the lamplight was like nothing I had ever seen.
She reached toward me and I blasted all over the inside of my boxers, trying to hide the spasms and contractions of my body during my severely premature orgasm. The bewildered look on her face slowly giving way to disappointment is one I can still see to this very day, even after everything I’ve gone through.
Being a little older and more mature, she was understanding. I only had to swallow my pride and know what she was really thinking of, despite her reassurances. I still feared that I was going to be a story she would tell the gals over lunch—the rich, hotshot real estate guy with premature ejaculation issues—but she gave me more chances.
We continued to date, and the next attempt was the complete opposite of my problem before. Pounding and pounding into her, I just could not finish. My dick felt like it was a million miles away. Numb or something, like it was somebody else’s. I pretended I had orgasmed into the condom I wore and snuck off into the bathroom to douse my junk under cold water.
Sure, she came during this session, but it only bought me a little more time regarding our relationship as the next few times we attempted sex were complete busts. I was limp dicked and unable to perform, a problem I had never had before. She started pulling away from what had been a blossoming little relationship, slowly and surely. She texted less and less and eventually quit responding, what the kids nowadays call ghosting.
I felt the closest thing to heartbreak that I had experienced in many years. It was raw and painful, and I realized that not only did I never finish having sex with her, I never felt the closure of something like a breakup. The relationship itself never felt finished, man.
As failures and falling outs mounted at work, I noticed other things. I seldom finished meals. At my favorite lounge, I left drinks half empty on the bar after I had ordered them. I couldn’t finish a movie or TV show. Even if I vowed to concentrate and see it through to the end—which most times I failed at, anyways—some outside force would cause it to stop prematurely.
For instance, I went out with some colleagues to a premiere and there was a power outage at the theater and they issued us rain checks. I went to see one of my favorite bands live at The Troubadour, and a freaking fire broke out in the middle of the opening number.
With each passing day, it only seems to worsen. I find myself unable to finish sentences. Conversations lull into an awkward standstill as I zone out.
“Ethan? Ethan, are you with us?” they ask.
“Oh,” I say.
“Sorry,” I say. “What was that?”
Forget finishing a book. I can’t even finish an e-mail or a memo. I try to dial numbers and have to be sure and take a break halfway through.
I can’t finish my order at the coffee shop or at the restaurants. I carry a handwritten note for episodes such as these and go to the same few places.
Oh, sure, I can finish some things now and then, but it’s almost like it’s just enough for basic function, just enough to piss you off. I’m surviving and all, but I wouldn’t call it living.
I mean, every time I take a shit, I feel like I don’t get it all out.
I haven’t replaced the Porsche. All the insurance paperwork after the accident, everything you need to do in order to buy a new car, I just haven’t been able to finish it. I’ve hired a personal assistant, and we’re going to chip away at some of this stuff.
Sometimes I just can’t believe it. I’m forty-one years old and already an invalid, basically requiring personal care like I’ve got dementia or something. I can no longer do what I was put here on this earth to do you see? Sometimes I feel like this curse or whatever would’ve affected my body’s vital processes and allowed me to just die, unable to take a full breath or pump a complete heart chamber of blood.
I’ve started and stopped this story so many times. In fact, I’m not even on the phone with you right now. This is a recording that I’ve been working on piece by piece for three goddamn weeks. I’ve no doubt left the room by now, off to start some activity I won’t complete or even hope to finish.
So yeah, I’ve just come back to record this last part and you’re gonna have to hang up at this point and call me back. Oh, there was one other thing I was going to . . .
* * *
From there, the recording stopped and started playing again from the beginning. I hung up the phone and called Ethan back. There was no answer. I called back several times to no avail, found his information on LinkedIn and tried to contact him through there with no success. It was several days before I heard anything.
I received a call from a personal assistant. She had found my number amongst some of Ethan’s personal effects, with the instructions to call me if anything had happened and something had happened.
Ethan had attempted suicide.
He had put a revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger. A utility worker had been in the area at the time and had heard the gunshot and called the police. They got him to the hospital in time, where he was now on life support.
Even in suicide, he could not complete the deed.
They had extubated him and he was breathing on his own, but he was unresponsive to any stimuli.
There he was in that hospital bed, lying in a persistent vegetative state from a death he couldn’t achieve, dreaming dreams he would never finish.
“Still working on your project? Those rules or whatever?”
“Yeah. I don’t have to go in tomorrow until 7, so I think it’s gonna be a late one.”
Sighs. “Okayyyy.”
“Look, I think I’m really in the zone right now and focused. I gotta strike while the iron’s hot.”
“It’s just that last night you didn’t come to bed until late.”
“Well, maybe I could take a break here soon.”
“We could . . . y’know . . . I mean I don’t want to distract you or anything.”
“Oh. Right. Sure. Just let me finish this up real quick. I’ll be up in a bit.”
9
“Call Me”
A 23-year-old college student named Yuvisela contacted me with her account of hearing the broadcast. She and her boyfriend had encountered the broadcast while driving one sultry summer afternoon from Austin, TX.
* * *
So, I have this thing with waterfalls. I’m a little obsessed with them. In my free time and when I’m not paying attention in lecture, I like to look on the internet at pictures of them and daydream that I’m there: the roar of the splashing water, the white foamy spray, my bare toes dipped into the icy spring. I’ve got a Pinterest page with hundreds of falls that I would like to visit one day. Niagara, Havasu, Victoria Falls, Gullfoss, Iguazu; they’re all on there. I keep them all catalogued for my bucket list.
Yet, how many people go to the grave with their bucket list hardly finished? I bet a lot.
My boyfriend, Gabriel, likes to mess with me about my obsession. He’ll come up behind me while I’m on my computer or look over my shoulder at my phone and see that I’m looking at waterfalls.
He’ll start singing this old song he knows when he catches me, some line about chasing waterfalls by a group called TLC. He’s about six years older than me. I’ll joke with him to leave me alone and quit singing that old-ass music, ask him if he used to listen to that on an 8-track or something.
“No, my older sister listened to it on CD. You know CDs? Those little plastic things with the holes in them? That little slot in your car’s stereo, a CD goes in there. They don’t make ‘em in the new cars anymore.”
We’ve had a variation of this same conversation a bunch of times. It’s kind of a running joke between the two of us—him poking fun at my waterfall obsession and me making fun of how old he is—and while he thinks the waterfall thing is a cute little quirk of mine, he also has been supportive of my passion. That’s why he surprised me with the trip that summer. He knew I was yearning to see some of these places. He knew he wanted to make me happy. He knew my resources were limited. He knew we weren’t getting any younger; I was 23 and still had a semester to go.
But he also knew that we weren’t getting any richer, either. At least not soon. I know I’m a bit older for a college student, but it’s taken me longer on account of having to work and stuff. I can’t take a full load every semester. Money’s always tight. I work full time and barely stay ahead, even sending some of my money to help my mom out. Gabriel offered to help me out some and we’d even talked about moving in together, but we had only been together a year at that point, and I wasn’t quite ready.
Before my dad had passed, I’d promised him I was going to get my college degree, and I wanted to do it all on my own. While I loved Gabriel and could see myself marrying him, I didn’t want to deal with a transition like that so close to the finish line. Besides, we were getting along so well as it was. Why mess with a good thing?
And it was a good thing that kept getting better. Just when I thought I couldn’t love Gabriel more, on my birthday he surprised me with the best present I’ve ever gotten. It was a little black notebook with this kind of leathery cover. While the notebook itself was nice, it was what was inside that was the true present. At some point, he logged on to my Pinterest page and wrote page after page of waterfalls, organizing them by country and state. He put little squares beside them, boxes to check off. The last two pages were Texas and Oklahoma. He left a note there. It read:
* * *
“Let’s start now . . .”
-Gabriel
The trip had been a blast. We had started out in Abilene, where we both lived and where I attended college. From there, we went to a place called Gorman Falls at this state park. It was one of the tallest waterfalls in the state and all the surrounding vegetation was lush and green. For a while, if I crossed my eyes just right, it was like I wasn’t even in Texas.
