Time: 3:55 pm
Grand Junction, Colorado. They exited into intense, Death Valley heat. Reginald set out for a quick walk, something to get the blood flowing again after fifteen hours of sitting. By accident he followed a few rainbow hippies wearing greasy baseball hats. When they ducked into a bar he kept right on walking. He had given up the sauce recently, due to realizations gained during an intense bout of hallucinations (a result of food poisoning from eating street tacos in Tijuana, Mexico). His soul hovers above him in space, a lozenge of cool bright neon… the components of his life like milky comets spinning slowly down and away from it. The How and the Why and the Wherefore of each event is suddenly, overwhelmingly, clear. His fifteen year affair with booze is linked to every major source of woe and failure, a thick spine running the length of many ribs.
He’d added “no more booze-houndin’” to his List of Rules.
So far, avoiding the sauce had been remarkably easy.
Grand Junctionians lounged in the shade along a newly constructed pedestrian shopping corridor. They stared at him as he passed. In LA he had relished the flamboyant anonymity, confident that people would not trouble themselves with his presence. But that is no longer the case, old friend, he thought as he walked among them. So let them stare. Take it as a compliment – no sane person would ever wear sunglasses like these.
The bus was not ready when he returned. Charlene had changed clothes. Her gaggle had dwindled to two diehards. Reginald munched generic Runts candy (a perfect early dessert) and waited with the other passengers. The candies are cheap and if you know how to wiggle the dispenser just right, like Steele does, you can get more of them than intended. Separate little groups of travelers all watched the news together: recycled political videobites; and updates on the latest national disaster…
Captain Fearmongery, may I introduce, Her Majesty – Lady Despair.
The combination ticket counter/snack bar was closing down with a kind of hopeful reluctance. The bus departed twenty minutes late.
They eased back onto the road, dipping and climbing deeper into the Rockies. Reginald had been tempted to talk to a few of the cooler-looking hippies in Grand Junction but was afraid he would burst into tears at any moment. The earplugs had remained in place. They were working quite well as single-serving friend repellant.
A rumble passed through his gut. He drank the last of his water and concentrated on the hunger, felt it, followed it along the peripheral nervous pathways all the way up to his brain and forced it to go away, to stop bothering him.
Hunger is weakness, and the Poor can’t afford to be weak.
A few hours later, in Glenwood Springs, he bought a bag of chips and a candy bar. Denver was still a good way off. He yearned to be there already, to be away from Charlene and the rainbows sneaking off to smoke weed, away from people who needed nicotine so badly, away from simple conversations and lighthearted banter. Something deep inside him knew that Denver was the fulcrum, that place where things would change, where he wouldn’t have to be so damn sad all the time.
Thunderclouds were passing low overhead, creeping westward. He hadn’t seen rain in months – summers in the Los Angeles Basin can be quite dry. Static discharge flashed and rumbled through the deep surrounding valleys. The air had that unique post-rain coolness to it. He stood by a bunch of trees to one side of the gas station’s gravel parking-lot. It occurred to him that he could be hit by the lightning and should seek cover.
The internal war was brief – his depressive mind won. I’ll just stand out here in the open by these tall trees for a while with lightning flashing overhead, he thought. Just then, the setting sun burst through an unseen gap. It set the fringes of the dark flashing thunderheads aglow in a riot of orange and gold.
His heart leapt and he was cheered. He realized that it mattered not if he got hit; nor if he got back on the bus; nor if he ever saw LA again.
The beginnings of an actual smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
If I do get hit by lightning, he thought; at least I’ll have seen that.
