H: Chapter Ten

After Jack picked us up on the side of the road, we decided to head out of West Virginia, and go up to Pennsylvania. Jack had asked if he could drive. He didn’t have a license, (I feel the need to explain that it only took one driving test to get my license. If you put me in a room of a thousand people, I’d be a better driver than all of them. Literally no one can beat me at driving) but he did fine driving Travis around. Knowing this, I allowed him to drive us to Pennsylvania.

However, Jack soon broke my trust. He had taken the wrong turn, and started heading South. We wouldn’t find this out until a day later when we reached South Carolina. So here we were in the middle of the South, miles and miles away from our goal.

“Hey, Payte.” Jack called out.

I took the cigarette from my mouth and looked at him. “Yeah? What’s up?”

“I think I just saw a sign welcoming us to Savannah, Georgia.”

I shot up from my seat. “Are you fucking kidding me? How the fuck did you drive this long without realizing you were going in the wrong direction?”

“I don’t know, man.” Jack said. “Sometimes I just drive without thinking.”

I placed my hand on the driver’s seat and peered through the windshield. We were just about to pass a sign saying that we were entering Savannah city limits. “Jesus-fucking-christ, you took a wrong turn. Pull the fuck over!”

Jack slammed on the brakes, launching us forward in our seats. He pulled over to the shoulder of the road and looked back at me. “Listen man, I’m sorry.”

I ran my fingers down my face. “It’s fine, really, it is. Just don’t fuckin’ make the same mistake again. Flip a bitch at the next median.”

“Uh, what’s a median?”

“The fucking thing that connects the two sides of the highway.”

“Are… are you sure it’s alright? You seem kind of—“

“Yes! I am okay! Now keep driving!”

“Okay…” Jack whimpered.

Thomas looked up from his book and stared at me with wide eyes. Travis did the same. It seemed my anger had triggered them. Though, it does serve them right for being such dumbasses. Nothing I do is without reason. So, in a way, I’m always right.

* * *

Travis laid across the back row of seats, completely fucked after taking five grams of shrooms. Every once in a while we would hear him mumble something like he was speaking in tongues. Then he would take off all his clothes and lie back down again, only to put all of them on again. Shrooms are a completely different kind of high. They can fuck you over if you’re not careful. If you disrespect them, they’ll disrespect you.

Thomas was chain-smoking and writing down in a notebook. He said he had an idea for a story and, “If I didn’t write this, I’d have to kill myself.” He never ended up showing it to us, so I can only imagine what the story must be.

Jack and I sat at the front of the van. I was driving and smoking our third joint of the day. “What do you think happens after we die?” I asked, handing the joint to Jack.

Jack took a hit and exhaled little smoke rings. “I think, hang on, I think… I think—we get reincarnated based on what we want to be.”

I squinted, trying to understand. “Explain that a little more.” I said softly. Depending on the strain of weed I smoke, everything is either insanely quiet, or extremely loud. This time, everything was loud.

“Think about it, man. Like, just think. I’ve read about it man, and it makes sense. We’re all divine beings experiencing humanity, because… because we want too.”
“Okay, that doesn’t make sense.”

“Why… why doesn’t it make sense?”

“Okay, so for the sake of this argument, let’s say we’re all divine beings. Okay? So you came here to experience being human. All the pain, the booze, the drugs, the embarrassment, the happiness, and the violence. Sounds cool, I’ll say that. But, we’re all supposedly divine being who came here, and we’re still pieces of shit. Like, no one actually cares to talk to anyone, they just want to hear themselves speak. Everyone has the capacity to be a murderer, a pedophile, an arsonist, et cetera. What I’m trying to say, is that the belief that we’re all divine beings is just fucking disappointing. If we’re all divine beings, then why would we be so… terrible?”

Jack fell forward laughing. “Shit, man. That’s makes sense. So… so, what’s, uh, what’s your belief?”

I smiled and said, “You really wanna know?”
“Yeah, man, yeah.”

“I think God got really bored being the only thing in existence. Just imagine it, you’re God, so your everything. There’s no one but you in all of existence. That would be soul-crushingly lonely. So I think it basically exploded itself into an infinite amount of pieces, creating the universe. And now, we’re just God playing itself in an infinite amount of bodies, because anything would we better than the boring loneliness.”

Halfway through my little monologue Jack’s mouth had dropped to the floor. “That’s… that’s kind of scary.”

“Yeah, it is. But it makes you appreciate life more.”

We fell quiet. Thomas was still scribbling in his notepad; the sounds of his pen skating across the paper echoed throughout the van. Travis was still riding the peak of his shroom trip. This time he took all of his clothes off except his socks.

“Dude… why do we even want to get to Maine?” Asked Jack, exhaling smoke rings.

That was a good question. None of us remembered why we wanted to get to Maine. I do have three ideas on how we decided to go to Maine, which I will explain here.

* * *

We sat in the van. We were sitting in the middle-row passing a joint back and forth on the peak of an acid trip. I had parked the van in the back parking-lot of a Denny’s. We decided not to go inside. Why support an establishment that directly profits off of slaves that are paid the bare minimum?

I took a hit off a joint and exhaled clouds of smoke. I then passed it to Travis who was sitting to the left of me. “We should reject life…” I muttered under my breath. There is a certain thing that happens to your mind after smoking the devil’s lettuce. You either become a new-age philosopher, or a paranoid-schizophrenic.

“What do you mean?” Thomas asked, grabbing the joint from Travis’s fingers.

“Reject everything this “life” has to offer. Reject schooling, reject work, reject money, reject anything that the few has chosen for us. We should live as monkeys flinging shit at each other, we should become machines that are only capable of killing, fucking, and eating. That is the only way to be free.”

Jack scratched at a boil above his lips and took a hit off the joint. “But what is freedom?”

“With freedom, comes danger.” I said. It seemed that my voice had become a thousand-times louder than ever before. I lowered my voice to a whisper and continued. “Freedom is setting a destination, no matter what it is, as long as it defies natural convention. The only way to become free is to dismantle the shackles that have been put on you from birth, and living a life so good that God is scared of you, because he knows that you’re his successor. That, is freedom.”

“So what’s our goal?” Travis asked slowly.

“Let’s go to Maine, and do whatever we want on the way there. Kill people, burn shit down, and steal and thrive as diseased rats in the gutter. Freedom is being dirty. Freedom is being disgusting. Freedom is being in danger.”

* * *

We sat in the Denny’s, not eating or drinking anything. We felt as if we could not take any second without food or drink, but we still did not order anything.

The waitress was this cute girl that had come to our table seven times or so, practically begging us to order something. I think that’s because there were no other customers, and that she was going insane not having anything to do. After all, you’re told that you have to do something, and when you can’t do that thing, what’s the purpose in doing anything at all?

Our very presence at that table was enlightening her to the futility of her situation. Sadly, some chicks never leave the nest. When I am the president of the United States and ushering in the New World Order, she might still be stuck there at that post, handing germ-filled menus to old men with cocks that don’t work anymore. Tis’ the human condition.

I stared at Travis who was sitting directly in front on me. He stared back at me, not moving a muscle. Thomas stared at Jack, who stared at him.

“Aren’t you guys angry?” I asked softly.

“About what?” Jack piped up.

“That we have nothing. That there is nothing behind anything we do.”

“I’m not angry at all, I find it freeing actually.” Thomas said in a whisper.

Travis sat up and took a deep breath. It seemed that he believed that he could subsist off of nothing but air. Thomas sniffled and let snot run down his face, not even bothering to grab a tissue. Jack stared straight ahead, stoic and unmoving.

“We should do something.” I said.

“For what?” Travis asked.

“Anything. The fact that there is nothing, means that we can do anything. So let’s go somewhere, for no reason at all. Like Thomas just said, it’s freeing.”

Thomas nodded. “Let’s do it then. Let’s leave right now.”

“Alright.”

* * *

“We should always choose the most dangerous option.”

“Why?”

“It is how we will grow. Choosing to color inside the lines, being complacent, will be the death of us all. So, what is the most dangerous option? What is the one thing that makes no sense to do?”

“Going some place for no reason at all.”

“Agreed, let’s do it.”

* * *

“The aliens will have none.” We were somewhere in North Carolina when we saw those words written on a hitch-hiker’s cardboard sign. He was standing on the side of the road in slippers and a bathrobe with a bag around his shoulders. His facial hair was unkempt, and he smelled like dirty laundry. A perfect fit for us dirty kids.

And, for the record, this is a thing that actually happened. There’s no more time for any philosophical bullshit.

Travis slid open the van door and stuck his head out. “Are you getting in?”

The hobo scratched at one of his dreadlocks and said, “Depends. You goin’ to Virginiah?”

Travis giggled, “I can’t even remember man. We’ve just been fucked up the entire time.” An empty bottle of whiskey rolled out from under the seats and out of the van, shattering onto the asphalt. Travis turned around and looked me in the eye. “Payte!” He yelled. “Are—are we goin’ to Virginiah!?”

I nodded and took my cigarette away from my lips. “Yeah! It’s on the way, dipshit!”

Travis sniffled and leaned against the van-door. “Yeah, we’re going there. Hop in!” He turned around and collapsed onto the seat.

We came to learn that the hobo’s name was, “Coach.” We never learned if that was his actual name, or just a nickname given to him by his friends. He was traveling the country after suffering through a nasty divorce. His wife was a raging alcoholic, but gave the judge a blowjob to gain custody of the kids. After the illegal-blowie, Coach was never able to see his kids again. Thus, he decided to set out on a journey to learn how to forgive her.

For the better part of a year, Coach had lived in Yellowstone National Park, living off the land. He killed his own deer, skinned it, gutted it, and cooked it. He even made his own clothes out of leather, and his shoes out of wood.

During his stay in Yellowstone, Coach had built himself a cabin with a stove. This was all well and dandy, until he saw a deer sleeping under the stars. He then realized how materialistic he had become, and tore down his own cabin. For the rest of his nature retreat, he spent it without a stove or anything for that matter. He literally lived on nothing but what was on his body.

One night, Coach sat beside the fire and ate what he thought was portabella mushrooms. They turned out to be psilocybin cubenesis. The mushrooms informed him of a sacred mission he had, but no matter how hard he tried to remember what that sacred mission was, he couldn’t. This led him to meditate for six hours a day. After a month he remembered that the mushrooms did not tell him of a sacred mission, and it was, in fact, a trick of his own memory.

Coach was alive in the sixties and spent nearly everyday doing anything he could get his hands on. At one time, he had done so much acid that he believed if he took enough tabs, he would learn how to levitate. He never learned how to levitate.

“I did everything. Ayahuasca, 2CB, DMT, 2C, PCP, acid, molly, DXM, amanita muscaria, ketamine, kratom, meth, heroin, coke, peyote, salvia, ethylene, roxy, JJ, everything, man. Everything.”

Thomas looked up from his book with cocaine caked around his nose. “How did your brain survive that?”

Coach tilted his head back and laughed. It was the broken laugh of a man who has reached madness. Once you’ve heard something like that, you never forget it. Even Jack was a little disturbed by it. “That’s the funny thing.” Coach said in between slight chuckles. “I didn’t. A part of me is still there.”

“Fuck, man.” Thomas said. He was busy scooping coke into a thin line on the cover of his book.

“You got coke?” Coach asked.

Thomas looked up and squinted, “Yeah…” He said.

“Well then, gimme some. I need to feel something.”

Thomas squinted and bit his lip. “Fine.” He groaned. Thomas doled out one more line on the book cover and handed it to Coach. He flipped his dreadlocks away from his forehead and snorted the line. Coach immediately leaned back and screeched something fierce. It was like an Indian war-cry, something terrifying that chills your bones. Imagine a dog-toy, but one that could actually feel pain.

It was here that I began to get worried. Had I picked up the wrong person? No, of course not. I was too fucked up on the drugs that I took to even begin to judge correctly. It wasn’t my fault. I can sense people right off the bat. I can tell what they ate for breakfast. I can tell how they feel. When I see a couple I can tell if they’re married, engaged, just started, or about to break up. I might as well be psychic. Hell, maybe what we call being psychic is just having good intuition.

Coach wiped the coke off his nose and snorted the rest off his pinky. “Sometimes my mind is just a dark hole, and I need to get out of it. Coke works for that.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” Jack said, flicking the ash off his cigarette onto the floor. “Sometimes it just gets too much, and that’s when you need to check out. Otherwise you’ll go off the walls.”

“So how long have you guys been traveling?” Asked Coach.

“Travis!” I yelled. “How long have we been traveling?”

“Seven months.” Replied Travis. For the past hour he had been chain-smoking in the passenger seat while Jack drove.

“No, it’s been eight.” Thomas said.

“Four.” Said Jack.

“All you idiots are wrong, it’s been eight.” I turned my head around and faced Coach, “It’s been eight, man. Eight.”

Jack handed Coach another joint, and he lit it. “Any reason you fellers are travelin’?”

I shrugged. “Because it was the only thing worth doing.”

Coach nodded. “I can get behind that.”

Hours passed by, and the conversation drifted to a number of things. We talked about everything, from death-grip masturbation, to the implications of anti-depressant medication in a sick society. I mean, isn’t it kind of dystopian that you need pills to trick your brain into thinking you don’t hate life?

There was one thing that I remember Coach saying that really struck a chord with me. It was something along the lines of, “One day they’re gonna have movies and video games that look so good, you won’t want to go outside, because it won’t look as beautiful. And that’s when we’re truly fucked.”