The Damned Highway, page 4
“Well,” Koehler says, “as you can see, this is a private meeting. I’m afraid I’ll have to insist that you tell us the purpose of your visit.”
“It’s like I told Sherman. I’m here for the meeting. I’m sorry if I interrupted all the fun. The bartender told me just to come right back.”
“Did she? Something tells me you’re not an initiate.”
“Should I have knocked first?”
I’m aware that Sherman has circled around behind me, but I don’t want to take my attention off the other two long enough to see what he is doing. His footsteps shuffle across the floor, and I’m fairly certain he’s moving toward the door. My eyes flick down to my watch. The bus will be leaving any minute now, and I’m faced with a terrible decision. I can flee this scene and let the Greyhound carry me away, but doing so will mean abandoning this story, and believe me, there’s a story here. I feel it deep down in my journalistic nuts. I can abandon the bus and stick around, scratching these guys and seeing what develops—but doing so might prove hazardous to my health.
“Uncle Lono.” Koehler says it slowly, drawing out each syllable. “That’s an interesting name. Lono was a Polynesian fertility god, of course. Descended from the skies on a rainbow and married Laka, I believe. Or maybe he was the god of music. It’s hard to keep track of these minor deities. They pale in comparison to the one, true god.”
“Amen.” I try to hold my drink still so the clinking ice won’t draw attention to the fact that my hands are shaking.
“Are you aware of the connection between Lono and Captain Cook?”
“Can’t say that I am.”
“Pity. You should look into it sometime. You might find it . . . illuminating. Still, it’s an interesting name. I would imagine that it’s not your real one, but then again, I would guess you have many names. Duke, perhaps?”
And just like that, my uneasiness and revulsion are eradicated by a white-hot flash of anger. I had taken great care in crafting this new pseudonym. I needed it for this journey. It should have worked. I was willing to bet that none of these three men had read either of my books, nor did they look the type to read the magazines my articles appeared in. There was no way they should have known me, and yet, they did. The malicious grin that spread across Koehler’s face as he noticed my reaction certainly proved that he at least suspected who I was, and all because of that goddamned cartoon. That comic strip follows me wherever I go, regardless of what country or city I’m in. It doesn’t matter if the people in that town think books are just something to be burned—if their local newspaper carries that cartoon, then sooner or later, they recognize me. It’s very weird. When you’re in high school and thinking about what you want to be when you grow up, you might decide on a fireman or an investment banker or a farmer or an attorney, but no one, to the best of my knowledge, decides that they want to be a fucking cartoon character. If they do, they should be shot in the head immediately, because such a desire would make all their other motivations suspect. There’s no frame of reference for what to do or how to react when you’ve been turned into a comic-strip character. They don’t teach it at college. No one has written any self-help books about it, although it occurs to me that I might have to one day.
I step to the side and Koehler moves with me, while Livingston shuffles forward, trying to flank me. The whiskey swirls in my gut.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “Duke? I’ve been confused with many people over the years, but John Wayne isn’t one of them.”
Koehler’s smile evaporates. He presses his lips together so hard that they turn white. His nostrils flare and I can see thick, black hairs lining their interior.
“Enough of this charade. We know who you are and what you do for a living. I’m not sure what brought you here. Perhaps it was fate or circumstance, or perhaps you received a tip. Regardless, you won’t be writing about it.”
“Oh, yeah? And why not?”
“Because you won’t be leaving.”
“You’re wrong there, friend. I have a bus to catch.”
Chuckling, Koehler steps forward, his fat hands raised as if to wring my neck. “I’m afraid not, Mr.—”
And that’s when I toss my drink in his face, buying myself an extra second to act, and mourning the waste of perfectly good Kentucky bourbon. Tough times call for tough measures, but I have never been one to abuse alcohol in that manner. Koehler reels backward, gasping and clawing at his eyes, and I take the opportunity to charge him. Head lowered, I slam into his gut. The air rushes from his lungs, smelling sour and curdled, and Koehler falls to the floor. Shouting, Livingston charges me, but I am already ahead of him. As he lunges, I sidestep, putting a table between us.
“You bastard,” Koehler cries, writhing on the floor. “You fucking bastard! My eyes.”
“Damn your eyes,” I shout. “What about my whiskey?”
Livingston weaves around the table and I move with him, coming back around again to Koehler, who is struggling to stand. His eyes are red, and whiskey drips from his nose. I swing my leather kit bag, smashing him in the face. Something breaks. I hope it’s his nose rather than my tape recorder. Then I run for the door. Sherman blocks my way.
“Get him,” Koehler screams.
I hear Livingston’s footsteps pounding toward me as Sherman crosses his arms over his chest and smiles. Then I notice that the door is locked.
“Gentlemen,” I cry, holding up my hands. “I’m telling you, this is all a terrible mistake. I don’t know who you think I am or what I do for a living, but you’ve got it all wrong. If you’ll just give me one second, I can prove it to you.”
Sherman’s smile wavers. “How?”
“My identification is in my bag. Here, let me show it to you.” I stick my hand in the bag.
Sherman is clearly startled. “Don’t you fucking move.”
“Relax. I’m not some gun-toting lunatic.” I pull out the can of mace and flip the top off with my thumb. “I am a different kind of lunatic.”
I blast him in the face before he can react, and then, holding my breath and squinting, I spin around and mace Livingston and Koehler, as well. Koehler, already red eyed, tumbles over again, and Livingston sinks to his knees, sputtering a string of profanity that would make a sailor blush. But I am not a sailor, and I outmojo him with my own inventive string of cursing.
“You pig-fucking, whore-hopping, jizz-stained little bastards better lie the fuck down right now. Move so much as a single goddamned finger, and I’ll spray this stuff up your ass.”
Just to make sure they understand my point, I spray another blast at Sherman and then kick him in the testicles for added incentive. Wailing, he curls into a ball and cradles his nuts with one hand while wiping at his eyes with the other. Long strings of mucous drip from his nose.
“I’ve taken up enough of your time, and it’s obvious that the senator needs your attention more than I do. Have a good evening. See you in the papers.”
First I run to Senator Eagleton. As a journalist, I shouldn’t interfere. As someone about to be pummeled to death, I should just leave. As a human being, I should be thrilled to see a real-live United States senator stretched out before me, injured and helpless, his brain full of guacamole. But I am a merciful god above all else, so I do the only thing I can—push the two tabs of Kirby acid I have with me between his lips. Eagleton’s aura instantly explodes in a coruscating nimbus of pure power and freakish black dots. He grins like a typewriter. Then I dash past Sherman, unlock the door, and run out into the bar. The bartender looks at me in alarm and starts to say something, but again I flip her the finger, barrel past her, and plunge out into the night. It isn’t until I’m outside that I breathe again, and my lungs are on fire. The mace residue stings my cheeks, but I know better than to wipe at it. A horn blows, and then I hurry to the bus. I’m the last one to get on.
“Thought you might not be joining us,” the driver says as the doors hiss shut behind me.
“I thought so, too, but then I realized how much I’d miss your company.”
“You’re an odd one, Lono.”
“You have no idea.”
I wonder for a moment how it is that the driver knows my new name. Did I reveal it while in Jack Kirby’s trip? It is possible, I suppose, but anything is possible. Hitler’s remnant Nazis could still live in Argentina and bus-station bums could have tentacle appendages and United States senators could get electroshock treatments in the back rooms of backwater bars. The world is a strange place, and it grows stranger every day. If one is attuned, one often gets the sense that some new rough beast, giant and bulbous and smelling of madness, surges to the surface rather than shambling toward Bethlehem to be born. In such a world, I can be forgiven for not remembering whether or not I gave the driver my new pseudonym.
The engine revs and the gears groan as we slowly start to roll forward. I take my seat, ignoring the suspicious glances from the other passengers. The Hispanic girl shrinks in her seat as I walk by, and I can’t really blame her.
We pull away and too late I realize that I’ve made a bad mistake. I shouldn’t have told the Committee to Re-elect the President about the bus. They already know my true identity. Now they know where I’m going, as well. Making up my mind to get off at the next stop, I lean back in my seat, pull out my Moleskine, and begin to write.
——
There is no such thing as America, no such child born in a mansion on a hill. There aren’t even two—not a white America and a Negro one, or an America of wealth and privilege held aloft by an America of the poor and twitchy. And even the dark wisdom of Richard Milhous Nixon, with his understanding of the great chasm between North and South, has an incomplete picture of this great experiment. Great, but not grand. Audacious, not enlightened. America is a Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from the corpses of the damned. The slaves of the Middle Passage, the raped and ruined red man, wave after wave of half-wit imbecile Scots-Irish not too different than the cats I’ve met so recently, swarthy Mediterranean inbreds, the insectoid masses of Asia, an electrified conglomeration lurching and howling in the frigid night. And in the abnormal brain of his monster, one so recently liberated from the brainpan of a criminal lunatic, there sits a single figure, a homunculus behind a bank of levers and switches, who dominates and controls us all. Nixon believes himself to be this entity, but he is not. Every candidate from the diabolical George Wallace of Alabama—he who perspires tear gas doesn’t so much call Brazil nuts nigger toes as he actually chews on the feet of little black babies—to the surprisingly effective but ultimately delusional Patsy Mink wants their turn behind the console. But that is not a throne meant for a human posterior.
And speaking of posteriors, I met an old man in New York once in saner times, when tribes worshiped their totems of Democrat or Republican with an unwavering loyalty. When brats died to confront the swastika, and didn’t even think to raise a peep for a part of the great franchise when they got back home. When the youth of America was as placid as a brace of well-dressed Negroes. He was an immigrant who came here as the free-range catamite of a Greek steamship, who painted the Brooklyn and Verrazano Bridges, and then sent back to his native island for a wife. Up to Massachusetts to find his version of the American Dream—a home, a fishing boat, and a little business of his own. The man was unused to the sheets of black ice that coated the region six months out of the year.
He broke his hip the hard way, against the thousand-ton anchorage of a suspension bridge, and now he slung hash at a luncheonette, huffing like a steamship as he moved from one end of the counter to the other, from the ever-rotating display of pies to the coffee machine—and why were they kept at opposite ends of the room? “The Jews,” he said by way of answer. “They arrange things to make us Greeks suffer.” He was good company, and as we shared pulls from my flask he told me a story of his native tribe: Once the parts of the human body had an argument over which was the most important. “It is I,” said the eye, “for without me the world would be unknown to us.” “No, it is I,” said the hand. “I manipulate the world and make it so that we can live, and eat, and prosper.” “You’re all wrong,” said the brain. “I am the most important. I interpret the input of the eye, and I direct the hand. I am the most important part of the body.”
Then said the asshole, “Actually, it’s me. I’m the most important part of the body. None of you would work or even dare move without me.” Shocked, the hand reached down and slapped the ass hard for its impertinence. And then the asshole shut down. The days crawled by. The hands clenched and twitched from the pain of the backlog of shit. The eyes watered and squeezed shut, trying without result to evacuate the body of its increasingly fetid waste through the trivial power of blinking. And the brain found itself choked by pain and anxiety, driven to distraction and finally unable to even think. Not one equation, not a single strategy to gather food or gain the sexual attention of another body, nothing at all except for one statement that seared the spine—we surrender!
And then the asshole gave way. And it accepted the surrender of the body, or most of it anyway. To the hand it said, gloating, “And because you struck me, from now on, you are the part of the body in charge of wiping me clean!”
This is what we were reduced to, he and I. Him, in a food-service establishment, telling stories of talking assholes puckering and unpuckering in a mockery of human speech, and me, stirring through my chowder and wondering if I’d seen something in the chopped meat and veg that no man should ever see.
After Kent State, after Watts, after Innsmouth, I cannot help but wonder if the old man had it right. The brain cannot be tamed; it cannot be accommodated. It can, however, be usurped. Will the Americans who live out here, in flyover territory, in Greyhound land, in the asshole of the country, be the ones to rise up? Will there be Freak Power?
——
When I’m finished, I am cool and calm and collected again. Tired, though. Very tired. Writing often has that effect on me. I do my best work at night, sequestered in my kitchen and surrounded by a cacophony of television and music and copious amounts of alcohol and caffeine. The bus offers none of these amenities, but nevertheless, I am happy with the outcome. My muse is a Kentucky racehorse, sleek and slick and powerful, and at last, I am getting a grip on things. I see now how this journey should unfold. I understand where the search for the American Nightmare must truly begin. Until this point, I’ve only been sniffing around the ages, wandering haphazardly and waiting for the story to find me. But that is not how journalism works. Instead, I must find the story.
I’ve written before about the Ibogaine Effect, just a month ago, in fact. The story was a simple one—candidate Edmund Muskie had been acting a bit strangely, and rumors were that his handlers had summoned a doctor from the Brazilian rain forest to bring forth “some kind of strange drug” for the candidate. Ibogaine, from the plant Tabernanthe iboga, had been a part and parcel of the CIA’s pharmacopoeia since the 1950s. The Frogs used it as a diet pill, all the better to oink away on rich desserts and buckets of red wine. Just the thing Muskie needed, really, even if his candidacy could have done without the scurrilous and utterly untrue rumors. The source of those rumors was, of course, myself. I created the rumor and then reported on the rumor. The Effect was that the rumor was quickly accepted as a fact and made the daily papers. That evening, news anchors in forty markets simply read off from the articles. In the bar at which I was drinking with the rest of the pool, my esteemed colleagues dutifully transcribed the material into their notebooks and then marched as one to a bank of pay phones to make the next morning’s bulldog editions. It will be interesting to see how that impacts his campaign through the rest of the year.
Ibogaine is said to encourage introspection, to allow one to determine one’s place in and path across the universe. The brave Pygmies were the first to harness the active elements of the plant, and they use it to pick their way across the otherwise-trackless jungle. To the Pygmy every puff of wind through the vines is a street sign, every leaf a traffic signal. My hope was, really, that a few of the more ambitious reporters would put down their bourbons, even for a moment, and try some Ibogaine themselves. It would only take one to dip his head into the Great Known—no un typed here, no un meant—and come out the other side ready to deliver a burning bushel of fragrant truth. But the little nerds just copied their notes from the blackboard and collected their A-double-pluses from their employers and the marks. Me, I got a good eight and a half minutes of fame, and a mission. I am untouchable now; even Nixon can’t pull the strings like I can.
The media were too easy. I could do it to them again at any time. Even the marks that finally wised up would have to report something—Deranged Lunatic Insists Mind Parasites Control Election Outcome. One could prefix the words deranged lunatic insists to any headline, and only increase its accuracy. It’s practically implied, and the reading public would hardly read the little phrase as a disclaimer these days. Success comes easy at a time like this; to really accomplish something I’d have to cut through the underbrush of ink and wires, to get to the real center of Americanus Assholius.
It occurs to me that Innsmouth is close to our final destination in Arkham. Yes, Innsmouth, home of the most violent and weirdest race riot of recent memory. Not an inner city, not don’t-call-me-nigger-whitey rage, and oh so close to those dark New England woods where Muskie first went mad with wild tears, in New Hampshire, if not in Maine. That is where the American Nightmare truly started. That is the dark source. And that is where I’ll start my own campaign, a campaign to save the world.
FOUR
