Chapter 14: All That Road Going (Part Three)

We were withered and strown. After a few hours’ rest we drove on. Before long we stopped at an outpost somewhere in the desert, staring dumbly at magazines with dead animals on the covers and jagged k-bars in display cases. The buildings were caked with sand and the people were roughened by the culture of frontier life—and energy drinks. We ate some breakfast—eggs, sausage, and toast—and took stock of how much money we had left. It was a luxury to sit down for food, taking a break from sandwiches made from loose cold cuts I bought back in Wisconsin. While we were saving a lot by avoiding hotels and restaurants, the gas and oil charges were racking up. After breakfast I paid for a tank of gas—nearly $60—and a quart of oil, another $8. “You paying for gas next?” “Yees, yees, I’ll pay eeet all. I won’t haev anodher deposit till Monday doe.” Bastard. At some point he had also lost his license, so I would not be getting any reprieve from driving either.

Some four hours later I was careening around mountains in Utah, roads so steep there were warning signs every 50 yards. “Mayn, you’re shiet at turns,” Alexandre scoffed. “You’re fyne odherwise but shiet, you brake too much round dhose corners.” “Dude, you don’t even know how to use mirrors. And you can’t even drive now. Fuckin’ passenger princess.”

He put down Céline. “Almost done with dhis. He ees so good, he mixes vulgar French wit de lattermost eloquence, but mayn he ees depressing as fuuuck. I’m at dhis part where he’s back in Frohnce, witnessing an abortion of dhis girl who ees bleedin’ out. He’s merciless and filled wit haete. But you know, dese vulgarisms are quite cohmmon. You guys een English call eet “cul-de-sac.” Een French, dhis means “ass of bag.””

He plugged his tablet in and turned it all the way up. “Dhis is Beh-to-fan’s Chorale Fantasie. Eet’s better dhan his ninf,” he said while jamming his pointer finger and thumb in the air like he was penning it down. The piece was indeed glorious, and swelled a completion over the previous days. It played as we were passing through Salt Lake City, eyeing the Mormon temples and vaulting Christs without stopping.

We took a break at a nature reserve. Utah has some of the best natural landscapes in the country, and it is the cleanest state I’ve seen—Mormonism aside. We said little to each other and walked separate ways.

I began to wonder about the nature of our journey. Was it just entertainment? Just an exercise in debauchery, as Mark Prochazka and my mother insinuated? No—we could have spent a week in Vegas or Miami like the guys in the well-to-do, professional class, swinging from financial responsibility to desiccation at a green light. Was it to “travel,” to “see the world”? No still, for we avoided all attractions, preferring what was on the outskirts or what was vain. Vanity—to a degree. But this vanity was not for ourselves, but for our Notion. What was the notion? Not knowing it, we were adventuring in search of it. We were searching for some confirmation, a pilgrimage. And while its appearance in the Nevada desert out of the riverrunning of word that had been fed by the streamlets of each previous place showed only in a flash out of the corner of the eye—in the way I’ve learned all revelations do, “from elsewhere”—it’s now frozen still in my memory, fixed in place for verbal excavation.

We returned to the car; Alexandre was immediately back on point with a rambling sonata on the miseries of Hegel—going from silence or sleep to spontaneous eloquence as was his brilliantly autistic wont. I listened to the barbs he threw, with grace, at the sleepers or lotus-eaters who cast aspersions at the active life, insisting we have progressed into a state outside the terrors of history, things-figured-out. “Dhey want finality because dhey long for dhe tomb.” I complemented this by issuing back on the “Anglosphere,” how in American public schools—or at least in mine, north east, middle class, where the whole budget was geared around STEM besides the money blown on sports—one is instilled with this unspoken prejudicial faith in progress of a similar sort, but with a slight difference. Its progressivism praised not the socialist welfare system of the present but the past and future capitalist mechanic busybodyism: through the fonts of the hagiography of Martin Luther, general praise but soft regulatory critiques of the industrial revolution, and faith in Baconian science, one is baptized in a TED Talk ideology that gives one’s ambitions over to a life in climate activism or the peace corps or engineering gadgets for our surveillance and enslavement if idols are not sounded out with hammer. “You know, in early high school I told my Irish farmer grandfather I wanted to be a physicist—I was proud of my choice, thinking it sounded great; I thought he would’ve asked me what that would entail. No, he knew, and in fact saw right through it. He said, with a wry smile, “Ah, you’ll be making the big bombs, then” in in his thick brogue.” We laughed.

Not very far from Trinity, we passed a truck overturned on the side of the road, rotting, tires torn off. In the distance, we could see the windmills of a small farm tilting wearily in the orange haze. “Ah but you know, I just remembered something: in early elementary school, teachers had us do a project where we had to pick someone we’d want to be like when we grew up. I said I wanted to be like George Lucas, but me and this kid Kyle discussed how cool Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were, solely for being billionaires… The anglo or capitalist system at least has this one aspect, that it preserves a shred of hierarchy, against the pure herd of egalitarianism.” “Indeed,” Alexandre said, shifting his leather shoes one foot over the other. “At least dhis rabble world has dhat.”

We had stayed at that nature reserve for a long time, as it was already growing to be night: stars were rotating up to replace the light. We drove through the desert and grasslands, passing through a string of unincorporated towns: Burmester, Skull Valley, Delle, as well as some strange locales like the Aragonite Hazardous Waste Incinerator. Three years later, a man armed with gun and knife threatened to blow up the site’s propane tanks and was shot to death by police officers. He seemed to have had no motive; maybe the desert made him mad, or maybe it was the modern tech world that had been placed over his land. But for us this stretch was eerily quiet, and our conversation gradually slouched into the feedback of my cassette tape and the winding western clouds.

I passed across the Nevada border in the early hours of the morning. Alexandre was asleep; no one was outside. I drove well into the state until the tank was empty. As the gas hummed into the car I noticed an InfoWars bumper sticker plastered onto the pump. I stared at it, and then at the green glow of the station under the first flecks of dawn coming over the mountain range in the distance, feeling like I was on an alien planet… I got tired, and pulled into a little quarry off the side of the road. My worries that it was private property, or that some wolf on the fold would come down and attack us, could not oppose my weariness. The sun was so hot overhead that it threw my eyes open just a few hours later. I started the car and rolled it through the dust right back onto the road, like nothing had happened.

We had been driving through the flat plains and vast desert for days, no showers, sober. “Throw dirt over these eyes, they’ve seen all the light of this world,” I had said with mock-weariness after the Wyoming debacle. Alexandre turned it into a meme, repeating it now at every lull.

Despite the strain, our youth bestowed infinite energy. We had Red Bull for breakfast. When we saw a colossal mountain in the distance, we decided we’d climb it. So we parked the car in a dirt patch and set off, not a bottle of water between us. There was some barbed wire blocking the way; the mountain was probably privately owned; —“fuck dhis shiet”—; we just vaulted over and kept walking.

“You know, I was thinking …” I said, pebbles crunching under my shoes, “so, if, as we were saying, nihilism is not the true picture of reality, but a pale cast of thought over raw facts, produced by the sick… if the craving for scientific truth is, in fact, a sickly impulse… that would mean that nihilism is not just a neutral position … but a conspiracy by the weak of will to poison life, to poison others… a conspiracy against nature by the weakest parts of nature.”

“Yees, indeed. Oh shit, yes, dhis is good. Go on.”

“Well, if Nietzsche is not self-help, and your point stands that men have different levels of … health and sickness… this would negate the understanding of nihilism as …. a state of mind, psychological, solved through therapy… something one can succumb to through logic…. Rather it’s organic and part of the struggle of life forms… Either they have been overpowered by their sicker parts, by their melancholic “black bile,” or they have been infected from outside, by others. In either case it is an evolutionary phenomenon… it could be studied medically, akin to a disease that grows to undermine higher life… the weak weeding themselves out, or the weak cleverly disguising their poison as neutral science, for use as weapon… Now the others have just as much will to power as anyone else… they are motivated by power… the role of nihilism and its spread here would be for the weak to hold the strong down, to sway them into an inert and depressive slumber, since they cannot best them by other means…”

We let this simmer for a bit as we trudged along through ragged bushes and crumbling rock. The floor of the desert was graybeige, a dried-out sea, the only signs of human life being desolate farms with pools of toxicgleaming neonblue water for their machinations. We realized the distance was much longer than it had appeared, but kept going.

On the incline now, we had covered a good amount of ground. Alexandre cleared his throat.

“What you expressed is dhe t’esis of dhe genealogy of moralzz.. I have not read dhat in some tyme, and must reread….. Dhe infection of liberahleesm spreads eetself on ever-greater wings, seductive wings becauhse dhey promise a respite from dhe harshness of will… fhink of Jacobson’s gay friend Tom, or dhat bitch Laurianne, or Henri’s bullshieet… dhey are addicted to dhe sloughing off of dhe .. burdens of mankind, greatness, and… dheir fake pity in dhis endeavor fills dhem wit moral satisfaction….”

“Yes…” I said, with heightening energy, expelling breath, finding my footing.

“Take dhat Samoan guy at New Orleans. Dhis guy is passionately arguing dhat you people, you Americans, didn’t build your own country; he wants us all to admire a bunch of loafers who haven’t done shiet, and emulate dhat…. What does dhat teach? Dhat if you strive, if you will, you will be stricken out of history by dhe angry, stupid, uncultured mob… if you sit around and watch TV leik poor peepal—who have so much fuckin’ time on dheir hands… then you will be redeemed. Liberahleesm, sociahleesm, is Christianeesm, which teaches nodhing but surrendering … to dhe desert, dhe Jersualem of death... consider Christ’s many parables taking place in dhe desert… where dhe desert ees laife.. and man has to walk across eet… a negation of worldly laife and an affirmation of post-mortem laife… guiding oneself wit… ascetic ideals… leading to God at dhe end of said laife… dhus into eternal love, dhus into His glory, dhus into nothingness…”

The sun pierced at us from its lonesome vantage, its visage naked in its glory. Pale tumbleweeds rustled in rare bits of wind. Slowly our disclosure was focusing, and sending waves up my skin.

“That nihilism was not of me, but was foisted on me… from the influence of people like Sokrates through the ages… you know, Plato said, “nothing that is human is worthy of great seriousness.” …. This urge to devalue the Human out of this hatred for life, brewed by an ancient gang of plebs—for we must hear, as I said, …. the physiological origin.. that Nietzsche wants to ascribe to nihilism—was buttressed by modern astronomical scientific discoveries… in the remotest galaxies, these invalids found what they were looking for… a weapon to deliver the priest’s poisonous wish… the insignificance of human action…. To prevent the rise of Caesars… beasts of prey…”

Some time passed. The caw of a crow or some carrion bird rang out over the long drags of sand behind; I thought I could see, in the distance, a whipping fury of clouds unearthing some manifestation, like a joyful Angel of Death spreading his wings on the blast. The sparse vegetation reverberated the shock. We were climbing over boulders now, enormous ramparts that encircled the mountain top like a citadel.

Breathlessly we continued. “And so … wat ought to be done?”

“Art,” I struggled, lunging my leg. “It… is the.. counter weapon.. of the strong… it celebrates.. the triumph of… active forces….”

“Yees,” Alexandre heaved. “Eet is … pure excess… eet’s de fuckin augmentation… of laife... dhe… banquet of passions…”

We gazed back at our trail. The car was a miniscule fragment, the whole arena of vast desert sands now unveiled.

“Like in your Orphic hymns,” I said, breathing deeply, catching breath, “most of mankind is.. longing for sleep, they want to fall off… but there are exceptions… “sailors” or “animals”… what if these animal men were not endangered, but overpopulated… a society so overfull with their… disposition, leeched of all… bad blood… that life took on a pleasant hue…. The weapons of nihilism, of “liberalism,” blunted,… no possible effect… what you said in Québec was right… life is about arranging.. a glorious existence for the beautiful… but I am right too….. that we must be serious… about this… we must be dedicated to achieving and … maintaining this… a rigorous effort, through art and… power… a defense for the strong spirited … against the plegic of will.”

“Mayn, write dhat shiet down,” Alexandre said, panting. “I am beginning to fhink… dhat dhis penchant scholars haev of warning… against connecting Nietzsche’s philosophy … to his political views… aristocratism, anti-feminism… is a prejudice…” he said. “I fhink dhere is something deeper to eet…”

A pool of chemically treated water beckoned to us from the valley; the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Alexandre went a little further ahead; I stood behind on top of a large rock, jutting out into the crater of the earth. He took a picture; I was only visible by my blue shirt, a blue dot somewhere in the sands of the desert.

***

We pulled into Reno at dusk. There was a sign for a sleazy pawn shop; a pavilion outside a warped casino, its art deco awning many years unbathed; a small arena for concert venues, with some washed up boomer act playing; cheesy erotica stores with XXX posters in the window, burning in vapid neon; staggering gamblers holding supersized sodas making their way from bar to slot; a big, rusted, theme park-like sign out of BioShock which read, ‘RENO: The Biggest Little City in the World.’ “More liek dhe gayest little city in the world,” said Alexandre. We ate from a street cart, looked around a bit longer, and took off.

Our simplistic affirmation of life had been surmounted by a despising scorn for the present, out of a deep love for what life could become. A glimpse of it would be seen in California. Now it was time. We were finally reaching the other shore. It began with a mountain cruise through the Tahoe National Forest: downwards we slid, chasing the curves of the road. The sky darkened; the streetlights came on; birds took flight from the tall pines; the phone lines swayed in the moistening breeze; from Route 80 the state opens like a quite grove, a series of ever-lowering ridges lined with bushes, bramble, camp grounds, lakes; one town after the next flew by—Mystic, Boca, Truckee, Soda Springs, Troy, Big Bend, Cisco Grove, Crystal Lake, Emigrant Gap—lowering into the west of wests, easing into terra pacificus—Baxter, Dutch Flat, Gold Run, Secret Town, Colfax, Meadow Vista, Auburn, Loomis, Citrus Heights—now we were in Sacramento, capital, and home of Death Grips; the drums of “DNA” rolled as we westward, downward coasted, “should we get out?” “Nah, keep goin’!” faster and faster, flowing, Davis, Sucro, Dixon, Leisure Town, Clima, Cordellia… the forests gave way to yellow tufts of grass, American flags waving, the red white and blue Route 80 signs proudly shining—that road which had traveled us this long way. We shot through Great Adventure, the limegreen tracks of the Medusa’s wild hair visible against the blueblack sky; we passed over the Alfred Zampa Bridge, crossing San Pablo Bay. Twenty more towns we passed, and we loaded onto, not the Golden Gate, but the colossal San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, called into being by “Emperor” Joshua Abraham Norton during the Gold Rush, an eccentric English Afrikaner who declared himself ruler of the west out of vexation with the incompetence of Washington, a benign tyrant rumored to have banned the word “Frisco” from use and issuing a fine of twenty-five dollars for anyone who disobeyed.

After a slight tussle with a bum at a gas station who cleaned my windshield without asking and then demanded payment, we rode to the other edge of the city, parking just a few blocks away from Ocean Beach along the tree-lined edges of Golden Gate Park. We noticed a great Dutch Windmill, harkening back to the old city; a few quiet gas outposts; the bluffs and breakers up the way. What a place to live! We crawled onto the beach—empty, dark, serene; the Pacific Ocean, final destination, a sumptuous blue maiden bigger than any god of old, cresting its slight tranquil wavelets onto the perfect sands.

Wading in the water, we talked of the place as if it were Elysium, even if the night air was as cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf. I still think of that place as paradise; hopefully it still is today; you had to worry about the street sweepers, but otherwise you could park your car and sleep anywhere as we noticed some hippies were already doing in a nearby RV. I’ve always thought that if I ever decided to start living Diogenes of Sinope, the great homeless Cynic, that’s where I would go. The homeless knew this well as we later saw: the park was full of them, junkies lying in sleeping bags. But we found solitude on the beach and we sat up on a sand dune, smoked some pot we bought somewhere on the trip and slowly fell asleep beneath a sky under which neither of our ancestors had ever been.

***

I must have been tired, for not even scorching sun burn up my leg was able to wake me. “Motherfucker!” I shouted, touching it, seeing the white dots quickly get encircled again by angry red. “Haha, get rekt bitch,” said the semi-Native next to me, who nevertheless seldom wore anything but long pants. We went back to the car, glad to see it wasn’t towed, and I threw some jeans on. Hungry, we drove somewhere downtown, parking between Union Square and the Yerba Buena Gardens. The chafing of my pants killed me; I sipped the last of the rum to distract the pain. There were about seven junkies around as we got out, one lady well on her way through an argument with an invisible man, cursing him with abandon. “You think it’s okay to park here?” “Yah mayn, it’ll be fyne.” Jonesing for booze, Alexandre went into a Japanese bar while I hung out on the sidewalks, looking in the store windows, smoking Camels. He came out 15 minutes later, telling me the life story of the bartender, a second-generation Japanese woman who lamented the politicians and drug addicts ruining her city. “Fuhcking libeerals, mayn…” We bought some sandwiches and walked around, talking about the Japanese bartender and the perniciousness of the “liberal” type—this word wasn’t in my vocabulary much previously; when I was in high school after my Alex Jones conspiracy phase in middle school I briefly got behind political liberalism, seeing it as an alternative to evangelical stupidity, but when I began to realize a commitment to it would lead to a life of protesting and holding lame signs among the damned I lost all interest. I could see what Alexandre was doing with it, muttering things like “fuck barbed wire… fuck Birmingham… fuckeen’ leeberals.” The most disparate things could be understood as “liberal.” Taken as a universal category rather than a pure reduction to American electoral politics, “liberalism” could absorb everything that was decadent, complaining, “gay,” vegetarian, sclerotic, rule-following, illiterate, scientistic, and fat about our world—and coming from a person like Alexandre rather than Sean Hannity it didn’t ring in opposition to young earth creationism but the poetic and true life, which wishes to die a wonderful fiery death rather than expire on a hospital bed. “Mayn, my mom told me of her modher’s death, where her and my aunt gadhered roun’ her at dhe hospital, watched her die under dhose florescent laights, and dhe sisters looked at each odher and sighed deeply, a deep dreadful sigh, one of dhose moments where you realize how wretched dhis existence ees.”

From this we got to talking about how to write of contemporary life, walking through the corridors that, unbeknownst to us, would come to define it—as well as that liberalism we had just casually trashed. I have motioned to this prior, but one of the main forces of discordance within Alexandre’s artist-soul was his urge to uphold the highest classical standards on the one hand and his terrorizing belief in needing to conform to the zeitgeist on the other. So he’d praise Mozart and Palestrina and denigrate all other music, and then in the next breath he’d say he needs to write like Bret Easton Ellis. “Mayn, I don’t know. I aym constantly torn batween dhese two fhings, what I know ees da best, verse drama on dhe level of Corneille, and what’s goin’ on raight now.” We looked around us: there were people working on laptops with complicated coffees; a guy throwing a frisbee with his dog; a security guard gently pacing back and forth in front of a bank. Suddenly a black hipster girl came up and felt Alexandre’s hair. “Ooh wow, it’s so nice and soft,” she said, “sorry, I just had to.” “What dhe fuck, you don’t even ask?” He glared at her but with a smile. She laughed with her friend and walked off. “Dhe fuck is wrong with peepal. I don’t know how we shall write about shiet like dat, all I know ees we have to write. Let’s get some beer.”

We ended up smoking the rest of the weed instead, aimlessly strolling the city blocks baking in the sun. Alexandre asked for a picture in front of this homeless guy laying belly-up on the sidewalk, because it looked funny with the wall art behind him: a mural depicting a six-set jazz band, a dirge for the old passed-out bum. He put it on Instagram. “Wow, fucking edgelord,” replied some anon on /mu/ to the picture days later when some other anon had posted it, in a thread of CLT and randoms discussing our trip.

Some time passed; we turned a corner and the Mercedes reappeared, with the same homeless crowd and the woman still having the same argument with the invisible man. We drove around till we got lost in some dockyard district, poking around warehouses and spools and great abandoned trucks. I put the car in reverse as a guard was yelling. Then we turned back into town off a side street, beautiful and undulating with dramatic hills and expensive apartments; I told Alexandre about how my Italian grandfather wanted us to meet up with his friend in Los Angeles, a movie producer; we imagined pitching him a script and becoming famous.

We took the car back to Ocean Beach, passing a casualty of the sun—a guy high out of his mind with his entire body burnt to a red crisp, still with his shirt off walking in the sunlight like he didn’t even feel it, just grinning widely with sunglasses on. “Jesus Christ,” I mumbled, “how contemporary.” Before we parked for the night, Alexandre asked for Burger King; I granted his wish, and he grabbed the aux to show me Delius. “This is his Florida Suite. Shiet is phenomenal. So it’s dhis late romantic composer, raight, he was given a plantation by his fadher to watch over in Florida; but he didn’t want to work, so he just composed dhis beautiful piece—I play eet during sex, eet goes great wit a coke bender.” Heaving up over the Gulf came this solar melody, sounding like the pages of Die fröliche Wissenschaft reverberating in thin air. “Yees, yees you’re right, Le Gai Savoir!!!” “So he’s late romantic but not Wagnerian?” “Yees—pure Nietzschean, pure ineffable lightness but wit dhese big orchestras and colossal sounds. In fact, he has a fhing called De Mass of Life, wit text taken from Zaratustra.” We ate our Whopper meals listening to it; I lit up a cigarette and my mood heightened as the piece grew into a dancing song. It was dark; the trees formed great canopies swaying in the cool breeze; I drove us through streets glowing blue, packed with the promises of hidden futures as the halcyonic concert boomed. The main drag was full of life, people chatting on patios, hippies playing guitar and smoking weed in bushes. We stepped onto the beach and watched the waves crash, talking and talking, discussing Delius and movies and a thousand different things.

We spent the next few days doing this, reading in the car, hiking through the park, sitting on the beach, doing nothing at all. One night, passing on the boardwalk, I got to thinking about fame again; and the sameness of the scenery was weighing on me. I moseyed up to the car and suggested we go check out LA. Alexandre looked up from the passenger seat, Faust II in hand, ashing his cigarette on the road. “Yah, let’s do eet.”

Early the next morning we rode out of town and gunned it down the interstate—either we didn’t know about the scenic route or we didn’t care to go down it. At a gas station on the way I heard MGMT on the loudspeakers. Let’s make some music, make some money, find some models for wives … I watched the dollars go up on the machine, felt the upsurging loneliness over lack of girls … what else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute? I lapped it up, letting the satire go over my head. The desert revelation had insulated my mind from all weary questioning, and the Delius piece had left me crazed; we listened to it again that morning drive, I couldn’t get enough of its festive celebration of Helios. “Man, if you could only see what I picture when I hear this…” I learned over and hit Alexandre with cigarette in hand, “imagine, a new era, where after civil wars rock the earth a new coterie of Caesars seize power, and reinstate a kind of pagan religion… parades with war-spoils and wild animals through our cities, arenas far surpassing the Colosseum. We would build shit like Hadrian’s villa and the Palace of Versailles again, unconstrained by funds or laws or quotas or welfare, our world with its current technology but completely divorced from liberalism… gardens at villas, declamations of new verse by the best poets, like Goethe in the groves of Weimar or Horace and Ovid chilling with Maecenas..” “Yees! Fuck yees! Dat’s all in dhe music! I hear it too! And much more!”

I swerved around some roadkill, raised the music, and took an exit. I was going off road signs—we hadn’t used the GPS in weeks. “Mayn, all we’ve got ees our writing. Consider dhe lobster. Trew poetry, we can sway dhe masses.” “You don’t think you’ve also got music?” “Nah, I mean, let’s face eet, poetry is what I’ve got, dhe music is secondaree… we must write some fucking poetry..”

We were coming up on LA; I took the signs to Sunset Boulevard. I thought about playing “LA Woman,” then thought better of it. “Imagine how many people have entered LA playing LA Woman.” “Too manee.” We put on Death Grips and rode up a hill bringing us to a red light. Gigantic Lexuses descended from steep driveways, guarded by stone walls, iron gates and bronze lions adorning them. Mercedes and Audis sped by us. Farther up, stylish people sat outside drinking iced lattes in Ray-Bans. And there we were, two dirty skinny teenagers in a dingy car leaking oil on the pristine street.

One of Alexandre’s swings to the contemporary occurred here. No longer was “everyfhing so disgusteeng and plebeian” ; the landscape plunged him into a rage at the academics for being so obtuse in the face of the unlearned pleasures of the mindless young and rich. While he tried, in his stories, to elevate the youth culture of Québec to this “stature,” here he was in the land of Less Than Zero, as close to the epicenter of chic nihilism as he’d ever been: he was really shivering, like a pious old woman visiting the Vatican for the first time.

I didn’t care much for this line of thought. Through my stepmother I had seen enough of what the American mind dominated by cheap romantic dramas about Xers with pill addictions looked like to know it was really as worthless as Walmart boomerism. My discordance, which tethered between a refusal of religion and the feeling that a terrible new holiness must be born, won out in the end. But we’ll get there in due time.

After cruising past hip cafes and architected rainforests, he came down with a sort of fever and begged me to find a bathroom. Perhaps it was Stendhal syndrome? As luxurious Eden faded into the jungle of abrasive strip-mallery, all still on Sunset, I found a McDonald’s and flat-handedly rolled the wheel into the lot. He jumped out and ran inside; still holding onto this quaint belief that you had to ask the patrons of an establishment to use their restroom, even if it was a corporate chain, he waited in line for ten minutes, shaking his legs, calling for God, banging his striped sleeves against his white slacks amid fat people in shorts and fannypacks. He finally gave up and ran to the back. I went to the car and smoked a few boges, checked social media. Elizabeth had liked my pictures of our trip, as had many others from back home, but I didn’t care about them. I looked up at the noon-scorched horizon. Was she thinking about me? Then Alexandre climbed back in the car; he said he had had the worst shits, and some strange discharge from his dick; that his doctor had previously told him he didn’t have much longer to live, that he was suffering from some form of liver damage due to his excessive drinking. He felt better now. “Leet’s go to dhe beach.”

Venice beach was like Seaside Heights but with weed legalized—a rare thing in 2014. Drawings of marijuana leaves against black plastic backgrounds attached by bars to the shops hovered over the throngs of beach goers, shabby and raucous. Barely any outdoor gyms left over from the days of Arnold; no Manzareks or Morrisons discussing Birth of Tragedy to be seen; no Lords of Dogtown skaters turning pools into half pipes; no Baywatch beauties in red swimsuits. The idols are broke in the temple of Baal. We found ourselves buying a bottle of rum and downing it on empty stomachs. We took some drugs and started roaming the LA night.

We fell asleep in the car and woke up to an angry Mexican guy yelling at us through the window. On closer inspection he was a landscaper trying to park outside the first house on his list. I wiped my eyes and started the car, already hot as fuck, and drove off, Alexandre still confused. I sped down some streets; these were suburbs just off Venice; cramped and crowded, one car was jutting out into the road and my car swiped it as I sped past. “Daym, you literally just slightly scratched dat Corolla,” Alexandre said. We had been listening to Yeezus nonstop, along with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; Kanye was the soundtrack of this whole second half of the trip, spiritually if not always literally; the scenes painted in “Lost in the World,” “Blood On the Leaves,” “Hell Of a Life,” “Hold My Liquor”—like the granular debris of crushed up pills coursing through Tronlike streets beaming with white lights—those were our scenes, youth and excess, despair and godliness, sin and hope, Mike Dean’s guitar synths as the aural embodiment of ‘breaking out of this plastic life, running from the lights and the night,” lab drums and electric female choirs, a burgeoning new oligarchy out of the ashes of ’08 and the false promises of Obama, the dissolving of the moral glue of things, resignation toward the end of the world in climate death with limitless bliss for the carefree few who would survive beyond it, in penthouse suites and Armani suits.

I can’t remember what we did that day outside the realm of phantastic delusions beside drive around the eerily empty skyscrapers but I know that around evening we started to get annoyed with our low batteries and lack of easy access to alcohol, as every second proprietor would call the cops on our fake. We scanned Google for a place to sleep and found a cheap hostel in Inglewood called “Traveler’s Paradise.” We bought two keys for one night’s stay; that turned into five, but they never checked. We found our room: essentially barracks, it contained several iron bunkbeds with thin tarps for mattresses. We threw our stuff there and went over to the tiki bar, which immediately served us cocktails no questions asked. “Now dhis, dhis ees what I’ve been looking for; fuck hikeeng, fuck campeeng.” I gazed around: we were in an outdoor pavilion, hemmed in on all sides by lodgings for the travelers; palm trees, many real, some inflatable, all covered in Christmas lights; pink flamingos standing in mulch; in one direction was the office building and entrance, another had a parking lot, where we put the Mercedes, and another had a wide lawn along which Mexicans toiled away on a new building project. An inflatable bald eagle wearing Uncle Sam’s hat and an inflatable Donkey, presumably the Democratic Party’s rep, adorned the path to other rooms, private unlike ours; “PARADISE” written across a parade-like banner hung over them, and dead in the center of all this was a large chlorine-filled pool, surrounded by lawnchairs and tanning whites. An allegory of these States as they were at that time.

The bartender, a 30-year-old woman with a pixie cut wearing fairy wings from Party City, began to ask us questions. “We are writers,” Alexandre informed her. “Yeah? Is your writing any good?” “Mine’s gold—dhis guy’s,” he did the semi motion with his hand, “is silvur.” “Ayyy, I’m gold. This guy writes love poems about Rebecca Black!” “Nah mayn. Siluvr. Aldough I ain’t too good at deciphering English verse.” The bartender skipped over our bullshit. “And how old are you guys?” “22,” I answered. “Never been to LA before. Where should we go?” “Eh, it’s alright, you could check out Santa Monica, I guess.” “Don’t go to Houllywuud, we were zhere last night and-dit was just hohme-less crackheds!” I turned my head: two mid-twenties Russian guys were looking over, total bums. “Yah, we were staying zhere and partied on a zhe roof, you could zee ze Hollywood sign, although zhat’s not wort zeeing eider.”

Just then two girls passed by, catching my attention: one was a pretty blonde, the other a buxom redhead; they walked along the side of the pool, clacking their flip-flops, and sat down next to a husky blonde woman, presumably the first one’s mother. They took off their tops, revealing thin bikinis, and laid themselves out across long striped towels, shades on, butts out.

Then all of a sudden this big douchebag in a wifebeater sat down at the bar and barked “the usual” to the fairy. He introduced himself: a 26-year-old bouncer from the Jersey shore, on vacation; he called over a girl who had a narrow platinum rattail for hair; she was a Dutch student traveling for “holiday.” They had found each other here, in Paradise, and were looking for a ride to Vegas. “We could give you dat,” Alexandre offered without discussion. I sighed, thinking about listening to this doofus on a four-hour car ride. “Duuaude, that’s sweeet mannn, yah I’ll definitely gives you guyz da hook-up there, I’ve got maad friends who gamble for a living out there, shit will be Ace man, fuckin’ ACE!” He did this strange cough-snort, coke addict, and slumped out of his chair. “Goin’ back to the room, baby-face; gonna take a val and lay down.” He kissed rattail and sauntered away, fistpumping to the LMFAO song cringing through the weak speakers.

All these introductions over with, we ordered some burgers, along with a dozen cosmos and piña coladas; now was not the time to have manly drinks, now was the time to have “gay-ass shiet dat tastes good as fuck” in Alexandre’s elegant parlance. After the meal, we ran out of cigarettes and went to fetch some across the street, a wonderful 24/7 convenience store with a stageplay of locals bugging out every half hour. We watched a fight erupt as we sipped from solo cups and smoked Camels. “Mayn, dhis playce is greaat.”

Paradise had another bar, in-doors, which served dinner. We went over there when it was getting late and sat down at a bar coiffured with brown leather arm cushions and green velvet foot-pads, dark and smoky from a Los Angeles gone by. Perhaps this cigar-saloon is where it all started, and Paradise evolved around it, adding more and more wings as the entertainment world grew. An old lady, a few stools down from us, sidled herself closer and began a conversation. She told us, unprompted by any biographical detail of our own, that she was a writer, and that she had been trying to get her best story published for years, to no avail. She talked slowly and woozily, a little touched. “It goes like this,” she drawled, a southerner. “A little girl, from a poor family—an orphan, in fact—she goes up to a rich man, a millionaire [the story was not adjusted for inflation], and says, “hey mister millionaire, my name is Poor Little Sue; I don’t gots any money for new shoes. Say, could you lend me a few, so I can buy me a pair of neat new blue shoes? All I need’s is change for a penny.” We looked at her expectantly. “That’s it; she keeps repeating it like that, “I need change for a penny.” That’s the title too, Change for a Penny.” We stared blankly. “Wow,” I said. “that’s… interesting.” “Mmm,” Alexandre said in a high tone as he sipped his whiskey, “Alraight. I like it.” Then she started in on her family, and how they were no good to her; we asked her where she lived. “Next door. Been here for a few years. I come to this bar for company.” We felt bad for her, but then she started getting weirder and weirder with her oversharing of personal information. After we paid our check, we told her to have a good night.

We went for a swim. The pool was lit up now; it was almost a tropical resort if you could ignore the sounds of traffic and the parking lot and the smog. The blonde and the redhead jumped in and started talking to us. “How old are y’all?” “Eighteen,” I said, then shot an alcoholic glance over at the bar; fairy had gone in for the night, changing of the guard with a statelier matron. “You?” “I’m seventeen, she’s sixteen,” the more confident Redhead said. They explained that they came here with the blonde’s mom last summer and liked it so much they booked it for two weeks; I gathered they weren’t very wealthy, not exactly trailer trash but not far off; they were from Washington State, I think. After flirting for some time with them and saying goodbye, early the next morning they and their mother found me sitting by the pool and asked for a ride to McDonald’s—they were craving a McDonald’s breakfast and they had no car, they had taken a bus all the way from Seattle to stay right here in this concrete lot. We went through the drive thru, they got their egg McMuffins and hashbrowns. I indulged as well. I came strolling back into the place with them, McDonald’s bags in hands, to an Alexandre gazing confusedly at the bar. “What ees.. goin on here?” he asked in genuine wonder. I just laughed, didn’t even explain, reveling in the absurdity.

The weirdness just kept increasing. We noticed this disheveled guy in a gray tracksuit just stalking around the perimeter of the place; the fairy bartender told us he had been staying here for weeks, just gazing around like that, and scurrying back into his lair. Then, on another cigarette run, we ran into this older black gentleman in a three-piece suit and wide brimmed hat, who, as cars roared behind him on the freeway, told us that the CIA had been spying on him for decades because of important information he was withholding. He was straightfaced, and talked low, but with a nimble gladness. Alexandre wasn’t having it. “Mayn, you know the words to dhis song?” he pointed to the stereo at the bar playing “Hotel California.” “Eeet’s about a hotel you check into that you can never leave… dat’s where we are raight now, mayn, I’m not fuckeeng keeding.”

Some time later we were chilling on this patio and got to talking to this flamboyant Brazilian guy who worked as a stagehand for Axl Rose and other bands. He said part of his job was gathering drugs for the bands to do at after parties. We asked if he had any; indeed he did, but it was prescription Vyvanse for himself—he had extra and was willing to sell it. We had done Vyvanse back in Orville one night with one of my friends—we snorted it to increase the effect. We agreed and bought it; with our conversation’s drift into literary things he slinked away. Discussing the “gold versus silver” remark before, Alexandre asked me to read that poem I wrote in Québec. After I finished, and Alexandre commended, he began to shout suggestions as I read through it a second time. We began to feverishly edit it, passing my phone between our hands, jittering now because of the speed. Each line prompted winding digressions. Alexandre told me about the intricacies of the French Pléiade poets and the verse of Villon. I explained by turns the different passages’ debts to Shakespeare, John Ashbery, and Dante, as well as Animal Collective’s mournful “For Reverend Green” and “Fireworks” off Strawberry Jam that make me think of my breakup with Jess, filling me with the depression wrapped up in the memories of the orange streetlights and the barren roads of winter every time. The poem was mangled by the end; I reverted all changes except his word “needn’t”—he had a penchant for contractions, a French preference—I removed all his Celinean archaisms, though I liked the idea. Chainsmoking like fiends, we blazed through both packs before the sun began to peek over the horizon. We stumbled off to the gas station to buy more, wickedly castigating various canonical writers, oblivious to the armypotente junkies harassing us outside the store. As the sun came up Alexandre started telling me about Ellis’s Glamorama, likening the sun’s rays to the confetti in the book. He said Ellis, in the later parts of the novel, begins to blur reality, where the main character, a thoughtless male model yclept Victor Ward who gets inducted into a terrorist cell, begins to notice a camera crew trailing him as if he is on the set of a movie. He can’t tell if the terrorist attacks he’s committing are real and they are blackmailing him, or if it’s all fake and he’s being cast in an acting role, or if they’re even there. Confetti starts to appear everywhere, in clumps on the ground and falling from the ceiling; eventually a plane explodes and confetti falls out of the sky. “Eet’s so fucking good, he handles postmoderneesm with grace, bringing eet into dhe plot without sacrifaicing dhe pleasurable readabilitee.”

Out came the Brazilian, who was shocked we took all of it. A while later this black kid came out with a backpack and sat down to join us. He was a student from Nigeria studying in America; he had left his home country due to violence that erupts every time there’s an election. He was talking about his biology class and how he had trouble passing it, and eventually divulged that he didn’t believe in evolution. “How does de change happon? I don’t see how it is posseeble. I am a Creeschin, of course, but scienteefically, eet makes no sense.” He went on a long defense talking about the immutability of thermodynamic laws and something or other about genetic copying. Alexandre, the Brazilian, and I roused ourselves, rallied the forces of modern western reason against his chain-of-being colonial Protestantism; we tried natural selection first, to no avail—“but how, how are dare changees? What mechaneesm changed de initial cells?” I scrounged the back of brain; I remember something about how exposure to sunlight can alter genes, how the sun’s rays manipulated the primordial cells and caused mutations, which were then preserved based on survivability. Alexandre was able to pick this up and run it home, descrying the name of the process. “Mayn, I have no idea where I pulled dhat shiet from,” he said, “I’m surprised it’s still een dhere somewhere.” He rolled off his seat. “I need a bludy mary…”

***

All the talk of writing still buzzing in our minds, Alexandre and I sat down at the bar to work. He was scribbling out a screed on paper towels concerning abortion, which switched over into a rhapsody in Glamorama style of his hallucinations of golden metallic thread everywhere. “And dhen, when I tought dhe vision was over, a janitor began sweeping up threads into his dustpan…” I began writing down the most recent stories of our trip in a small notebook. I will share the fragment here, to show what things changed, what things I highlighted instead, how I wrote about that time at the time. I apologize for repetitions; treat it as a ricorso, or an opera to the preceding overture:

It was hot in Nevada and I think the heat is what caused the madness. Three hours to climb a mountain with no water, the lightheadedness made raw by the pathetic lights of Reno, the emptiness and desolation, the humidity-less heat that burned more than humidity; not many hours before we were coasting down slopes in darkness in the middle of Wyoming with an empty tank taking wrong exit to twenty-five-population Arlington with NO SERVICES pointing in either direction scaring the children within us, safely making it down into Utah to cross its western border into immediate casinos in the arid night – all this must have worn our minds. Perhaps it was the hobos blasted away on ketamine in the streets of San Francisco, fifteen of them passed-out in a line against a wall downtown smelling like piss, telling off invisible people through daylight without changing location, and how, as we stepped out of the car for the first time in Frisco, we had fine gentlemen dressed in jeans and snapbacks with intent to sell, and the light of the sun burning our pot-addled heads while discussing VY Canis Majoris and the forgotten fourth major moon of Jupiter (Io, Ganymede, Europa, and…?), receiving neutral eyebrow raises from the stoned locals; or it was Venice beach with crowds of dregs wearing consciously-clichéd t-shirts and unconsciously barreling without blinking, smelling like Axe body spray and cooled, dead aspiration; wherever whence it came, madness we were living ere entering Los Angeles and it only ascended as we climbed the off ramp for Sunset Boulevard listening to Kanye come out of my thirty-years-old Mercedes’ speakers, watching the one-year-old Mercedes pass us by, one after the other, sitting dirty and sweaty taking in Beverly Hills for the first time. Alexandre, a postmodern dandy, Québécois, uninhibited and in style, was next to me saying “Mayn you feel bad being poor in a place liek dis”—those cars, those homes, those palm trees stretching up at the clouds in wealthy relaxation taunted our madness and our hoping and wishing for fame and respect and pleasure, but this went unnoticed because now was an intermediate stage to that as “everyding es fyne and everyding will always and has always been fyne.”

After hanging around Venice for some days, we drove back up into Los Angeles and rented one night but overstayed several in the cheapest beds at Traveler’s Paradise, the cheapest hostel we could find off Google. Fucking inflatable donkeys with Uncle Sam hats holding American flags surrounding the pool with swimming sixteen-year-old girls calling us handsome and following us around, all around the place twenty Mexicans working their asses off all day and night to serve these privileged Americans, Canadians, and liberal-traveling-Eurotrash who lay like walruses in lounge chairs drinking American beer, “zeis taste liek wah-tur,” while we drank infinite martinis illegally served—it was a “paradise,” it really was, but the insanity of the place began to gnaw at our minds and the so absurd people and places we had seen in this diseased and wasted land called California caused some serious cases of noidedness.

There was something suspicious about this motel: none of the travelers were leaving; they were working around the place for beds but for weeks on end, like they couldn’t leave; this Australian guy lurking in gray sweatpants and sweater with white New Balance sneakers—you know the exact kind of sketchy fucker I’m talking about—would just pace around and steal cookies from the “free cookies” stand and run to the pool, swimming with his clothes on; you say “hi” to him and he’d just stare at you in disgust and keep walking; a Danish traveler told me that he had been there for six fucking weeks and added maybe he wasn’t always like this. One Italian bartender was walking around in butterfly wings, this chick had never left, like she got stuck here serving Bud Lite to fat dads, some shit out of R.L. Stine. This suspicious twenty-six-year-old guy from New Jersey claimed he could find molly but then said the "spic ran off with it" (sure he did). We promised this same twenty-six-year-old to bring him with us to Las Vegas since he would give us a free bed in his friend’s hotel. As soon as we offered him the ride he turns around and says “you just got a ride to Vegas!” to some ugly Dutch girl with three strands of hair coming off her skull, so she cancels her bus fare counting on us to bring her “obnoxious undereducateed ass” along. The next day, the New Jersey guy said the Dutch girl stole his wallet and ran off. But he was still looking for a ride. That night, the last, Alexandre and I popped a considerable amount of Vyvanse purchased from this gay Brazilian guy who had worked for Axl Rose’s recent parties, so from midnight til the morning we edited about ten lines of a poem and discussed incessantly, shaking with intensity, smoking two packs of cigarettes and beating our fists when we reached a conclusion—the Brazilian saw us like this at 7:00 AM and dropped his jaw when we told him we took all of it, which should have warned me that Alexandre would be so insane the next day, hallucinating explosions of gold thread, alarming to the point that I abandoned him to his madness for a few hours and joined a twenty-three-year-old Nigerian, a fellow Paradise Traveler, in visiting a public library down the street that contained no Shakespeare but Simone de Beauvoir and RACISM: A Short History. Othneil the Nigerian had just got his passport stolen at the motel and was seriously pissed as his embassy was in D.C. and he didn’t have any money to go there, the only reason for his being here was to escape the violent elections in his hometown. On the way back to the hostel, through the ghetto-ass Inglewood, a barrio with used car lots and a trillion lanes of Hispanics in Hondas beeping at each other, Othneil told me he was studying Computer Science but also wanted to study Communications, “for business?” “Well, for business, and to talk to girls.” He was twenty-three and asking me if he would ever get a girlfriend, surprised by the fact that I had once asked the same, which then surprised me: “yes you will man, it all comes together” though I knew nothing about sexual charisma but, well, maybe it would—I met up with Alexandre who commanded we go to a nearby Jack-in-the-Box where we discussed our conspiracy theory about the New Jerseyian and his plot to mug us and we got so worked up that we sped right into LA freeway traffic without telling anyone except those young girls I would never see again, fucking over the New Jerseyian who was going to kick the shit out of us in his friend’s hotel anyways.

The last part was added after the fact at a hostel in Vegas. Between those two points, we could be seen tearing out of Los Angeles until we hit an absurd amount of road-work traffic in the Mojave Desert, crawling along I-15, passing all the spots mentioned by Hunter S. like Barstow but with far less drugs—but with the foreign-looking attorney in my passenger all the same. Chugging along in stop-and-go traffic like a beaten-up cargo train, rattling into station, ready to be decommissioned, man is this how the trip ends? Running out of gas in the middle of the desert no water no electricity just fucking watching the cars pass us as we wither and die with a bunch of dirty clothes and a shitty tablet playing Vivaldi’s “Summer” over and over? Just then a guy pulled out of the traffic—oh shit, jailbreak, he’s making a move. We watched him turn 90 degrees and just roll down the hill into the opposite lane. “Ah he’s just a fuckeeng spic,” Alexandre chuckled. “He probably doesn’t even know you’re not supposed to do dat.” All of a sudden the PowerPoint I made for a criminal justice elective class on illegal immigration came back to me, I thought of those photographs of Latin Americans hopping the border… a smile cracked over my face, I took a drag of my Virginian-made Camels like some conspiring tobacco CEO: is this our new advocate of American empire?... But just then he launched into a tirade against America’s corporate vacuity, and the omnipresent liberalism of the current state. “Fuck Birmingham, fuck barbed wire…”

Downtown Vegas was too rich for us, so we drove into Old Vegas, seeing that ancient, seedy “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign from the days of the mob lit up as we followed the GPS to a dilapidated hostel, in far worse condition than Paradise. The room was larger, way more bunkbeds, a bunch of creepy slobs getting ready for their big night out on a city they couldn’t afford. Alexandre was acting very strange; he was shaking while I talked to the front desk lady, he could barely utter a coherent sentence so I had to speak for him. I handed him his key which he took like a dementia patient, shambling around the room; he had regressed into both his childhood self and a weary old man, jovially flicking at his tablet in the corner. I went out to get things from the car, and on my way back I saw him taking off, stumbling up the road, muttering to himself. By the time I came back out he was completely gone.

I started walking down the sidewalk aimlessly. At a stop light there stood an Indian woman, maybe in her thirties, cute in a cocktail dress. I struck up a conversation with her; in an American accent she explained that she had just gone through a divorce and was partying with friends there. I asked her where she was going; to her room; she asked if I wanted to drink with her but before I could answer, mocked herself for being old and said I probably wanted nothing to do with her. I regretted for a long time not following her up, but the paranoia over the story of Mike the Jersey shore guy getting robbed and Alexandre’s previous mockery of me with Katnis pulled me back, sent me mute in fact, and I watched the lady walk up the road into the dark.

Dragging my feet in glum solitude, I watched as men and women partied around casino pools and open-window bars, in nice unwrinkled shirts, able to buy alcohol without being carded and without becoming bankrupt. I had only a few hundred dollars left, and knew there wasn’t a chance my ID would get into any of those places. After circling the strip I went back to the hostel and just sat outside, smoking; along the way I passed a group of black people sitting around a stoop, who tried to get my attention but I just ignored them. Alexandre showed up later and said he had been stopped by that same stoop and bought molly and coke off them; he said he’d save it for later. Before that, he apparently went to Circus Circus, “eet was liek a giant amusement park on dhe inside, wit a giant clown on de outside. I met an Arab guy in dhere, he could barely speak any Eenglish, dhe man was gambling away his life’s saveengs. Fuckeeng madness. As Thompson said, dhis is what de bourgeoisie would do, if dhe Nazis won da war!!”

That morning, in a blistering inferno of humidity that likely came from the sin of the place rather than meteorological phenomena, we hauled our money together for a tank of gas and drove off. Later, at a fast-food place somewhere in cool Colorado, I rapidly wrote out the following in the last pages of my now-tattered notebook:

Alexandre was speaking strange, walking around drunk-like during gas stops. Someone in passing politely said “you remind me of Jim Morrison,” to which he responded by spending half an hour laying in the backseat assuring himself that he was original. We, mostly he, must’ve been going through amphetamine withdrawal or damage, one of the two: watching him dart his eyes around the Vegas motel lobby holding his book manuscript on several long paper towel sheets crumpled up into a ball, speaking in short bursts that made the young girl behind the counter glare at him, then at me dropping twenty dollar bills and motel forms all over the floor, rocking slowly from side to side, delivering commands to Alexandre such as “sign that” and “she said twenty-four.” After a night separated in Vegas, I found out that he bought cocaine and MDMA off a guy the next morning and, still running from the terrible fear of nothingness that had chased him out of California, told me that we had to go, and not an hour later he was blowing lines off his iPad while I drove through the 120 degree desert blasting Mozart’s clarinet concerto, “dis is better dan Bee-to-fan’s ninffh too!” “yes it is” I nodded in agreement looking at this French-Canadian bastard next to me, coke around his nostrils and a big scab forming on his nose from scratching an itch like a madman hopped up on amphetamines two nights before, his Ray-Bans crooked and tangled in his greasy hair, hadn’t slept in thirty hours at least—here I understood why a black woman had called him a “crack-ass nigga” earlier at a gas station outside of Paradise since he was humming “Hold My Liquor,” not wearing shoes with his shirt unbuttoned and wet: “you spendin’ all yo money on craaack and dats why,” pointing to his pack of boges, “yo so goddamn poor!”

***

Our wages, gone! Flittered away! Our funds Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord! We were in rural Indiana and had no money left for gas. End of the line. I distinctly remember having enough money to order McDonald’s, but not enough to order off the menu at A&W, where Alexandre went. He brought me into the McDonald’s first: “dhere, order off dhe dollar menu, poor ass bietch; you can geet a bunch of mcdoubles for cheap, I used to do eet when maiy parents cut me off in high school.” I did not know what to do; he had no money left either, it would be another two days before his dad would send him any. I called my Italian grandfather. He said I could use a Western Union machine in town, to which he’d wire $500; I’d pay him back when I could. He sighed and said I should’ve planned my cross-country trip the way he did, when he a rich businessman in the 80s and rented a limousine with a television set for the kids to watch, when that was a rare commodity. I just told him how right he was, taking it on the chin.

We got the money and began spending it on gas and quarts of oil, burning through it fast as we tracked across the country at record speed. On the border of Pennsylvania we stopped again, this time at a Domino’s. The lady behind the counter observed us counting out coins to pay for the food; she went in the back and came out with a box of random leftovers they were planning on throwing out anyways. “Thank you so much,” I said to her, and gorged on the tray. After that I jotted down concluding lines to my fragment, covering the commotion we had left behind in Kansas:

“We needed to leave the west though / everyone was batshit in the streets, ppl were coming up to me warning me about the CIA looking for them, nothing felt right, we had to go, and now we're all the way in Ohio 2 days later” I messaged Henri on Facebook, who was now bumming around in warehouses of hipsters in Vancouver, but what I didn’t tell him out of some abstract fear that the cops would hear me on the internet was that in middle of nowhere Kansas I saw red and blue lights coming from a sheriff whom I had sped past doing ninety in a seventy—he was undercover. “Fuck, shiet, fuck,” Alexandre said, and stashed his gram of MDMA somewhere. We pulled over, waited, and were ordered to stand on the side of the highway for twenty minutes. I steeled myself, emptying my mind, focusing on the grass swaying in the breeze. Alexandre was trembling with fear—I remember him clutching his copy of Faust II, pretending to read it to get his mind off the situation. I was already in the process of coming to terms with serving time in a Kansas prison. But finally, after rifling through the back seat and the trunk, he didn’t find it: the cop came up to us and told us to get lost, and stop driving so fast. I asked Alexandre where the MDMA was: he had tucked it inside a pack of cigarettes that was sitting on the center console in plain view. “Eet ees just like Poe’s Dhe Purloined Letter. Dhe cops will search all trough dhe house for dhe incriminating note and not realize eet was right dhere, sitting open on dhe dining room table. Huh huh! Fuckeeng genius.” We went over to my trunk and popped it open. All our stuff was strewn everywhere, but Alexandre’s copy of King Lear was front and center. “Ha, he was probably like, dese kids are reading Shakespeare, I guess dhey don’t got drugs.” We were so terrified by the sight of cops afterward that we threw the pack of cigarettes in a QuikTrip trashcan and as I got back into the car I heard a voice inside me, a yawp hysterically laughing, gotta get home; I said it aloud while turning the car around, Alexandre staring at me bewilderedly, and kept driving, driving 2,500 miles in two and a half days, the golden orb from Québec rolling back and forth on the floor, twenty-two hours in one night, gotta get home repeating, repeating . . .

***

I swung around an exit ramp in rural somewhere and the sun blinded me, sending us into a tailspin that nearly killed us. Totally decomposed, I recovered myself after initial shock. “Imagine having gone through all that shit just to die a couple hundred miles from home?” “I don wahnt to imagine eet,” Alexandre grumbled from his leaned-back seat.

A couple hours later I received a phone call—from Elizabeth. She asked about how our trip was going and when we’d be back. A Cheshire cat smile crawled across my face as we talked; Alexandre was guffawing at me, mocking the coolness with which I spoke. I told her we’d be back tonight, late; we weren’t out of Pennsylvania yet and Jersey would be another few hours.

That last stretch dragged on, the sky got ever darker, but at least there were streetlights now. The signs for 7-11 gas stations gladdened me; a name I hadn’t seen in some time. I took an exit for one and briskly got back on the road. Alexandre was asleep, I wanted to sleep but of course couldn’t; the fucker’s lost driver’s license was going to cause some problems, but that’d be a worry for the next day.

It was one or two in the morning when we got into Orville. I found with amazement that the same road my house was on connected to New Orleans, to Racine County, all the way to the mountain in Nevada and to the Traveler’s Paradise. The whole country was just one big circuit: the humming call of the 18-wheelers out in Wyoming can always be heard faintly on the pavement of any American street. But not tonight; we were happy to be off the road, in a meadow beside the roaring waterfall of the Hackensack River where we waited for Hoff and Shamrock to come have a boge with us. Just as they were approaching, we heard voices in the opposite direction. We turned around and saw Elizabeth and Samantha coming up from a hangout spot near the town pool. They enjoyed a few stories and then we were all invited to Shamrock’s for a fire the next night.

***

It was hot and dark and we were gathered around the blazing fire drinking and smoking, and forty people were there, recent graduates saying outrageous things and sharing stories and making plans to meet up in college. In the corner Alexandre was sitting on a lawnchair and Elizabeth was sitting at the foot of it; I could hear him saying “Machiavelli” and “Napoleon,” and then a little while later heard him telling the story of the demon who visits in the night and tells of the eternal recurrence. Elizabeth was smiling cutely, awed yet reserved, taking it all in. A bit later, Alexandre was standing up and mentioned Hoff’s name and mine; it caught our attention and we turned to join the conversation. “Like dhese guys, perfect example, dey have attempted to lord dheir intellectual powers over you, but it’s all false because you see dhey are really just doing eet because dhey are in love wit you.” Hoff shot back, but I just casually demurred. “Nah, it's not like that; not anymore, we’re just friends,” and I smiled at her; at the time I meant it, more so because I thought the prospect was an impossibility. But that statement of a foreclosed love apparently taunted Elizabeth, as I would learn later on, planting a seed of curious competition in her that would grow to full form in the coming days. It was not my cloying attention that won her over, but my matured disinterest and newly perceptible aura that I was setting off on the wide world to do great things.

A week went by, a week of struggle to get Alexandre back home. His passport had also been stolen, so he wouldn’t be able to travel into Canada. We learned this the hard way by driving all the way to Manhattan to visit the Canadian embassy, a basement labyrinth of opaque horror, made all the more horrible by the clerk telling him there was nothing he could do except produce a copy of his birth certificate. At this point he actually felt bad because he would now be entering week two of lounging around my mother’s house, eating our food and demanding rides to the liquor store (at one point, when my mother criticized him for making a girl pay for his vandalism fine back home, he had called her a “faggot”); he quickly messaged Armand on Facebook and asked him to break into his room, as his parents were both out of the country, and mail him his birth certificate.

On one of those nights Bambrick came over and I wrote the conclusion to a novella I will never publish, a parody of Don Giovanni with a female protagonist, Donna Gianna, who after rivaling Giovanni for body count was brought to hell by a commendatore just like him. Alexandre helped me edit the concluding hellscape while drunk to high heavens:

Foreveragain, the Commendatore seized her and brought her away from the light. They approached a door in the deep going-down. […] Up here hell was cold. Unpraised walked in the dark arboretums […] whereupon smokestacks further thickened the air with their fog, collecting into heavy stormclouds that violently shook, shook their ash, stirred smokes of burnt man; the wind spun itself an oak-cleaving whisper […] Before they could summon the monster whose weapon was gaze, a tritone-crying bell whence sprang twisted Ave Marias downward sang; and nine hundred dozen souls poured o’er the walls and out the now-opened gate, wild heat trailing the escape […] we rest upon temporal dirt that will fade into the great recess, decomposing all it holds; the currents of your case admire against that midnight hour, you in separate sail for a private weighing…

On and on that ghastly rigmarole went. I decided to abandon it because while the idea had some promise the execution was bad, a theme that haunted many of my writings, but it had some nice lines here and there. It grew distasteful to me by the time I finished it, unlike the road fragments—those remained unpublished because I had no way to connect to them to anything; I consigned them to the bottom of my chest of notes until just the other day.

Bambrick and him then discussed the French Revolution and Chinese history, and the night ended with Alexandre mercilessly mocking Victor Hugo’s La Légende des siècles, “dhe most bombastick pieece of shiet ever written, he wriites in dhe most flowery fuckin’ way about all of historee and all of humanitee with dhis awful leebral humaneesm, shiet ees so horrendously bourgeois, ahahahah… my moddher said “what ees wrong wit you” as I mocked dhis to her, ahhahhah…”

The next night we got tremendously hammered at a house party of this beautiful girl from town and we were basically thrown out because I threw up and passed out and Alexandre asked the one black kid where he could find drugs and was accused of racially profiling. That night, I awoke to him ravenously screaming, shaking a rum bottle over my head and threatening to kill me with it. In this moment a great calmness overcame me; I simply disarmed him verbally, told him to stop talking and go to sleep. He gave up when he realized he wouldn’t get a rise out of me. I was certain he was losing his goddamn mind.

His birth certificate finally arrived in the mail. That would be enough to get him over the border. We packed up his things and formed a gang with Bambrick and Elizabeth to drive him to Port Authority in the city. I got lost several times trying to get there, missing the Henry Hudson Parkway exit and ending up on the Triborough Bridge several times as I got stuck in Queens and then on Randall Island. Elizabeth paid the toll to get back into Manhattan out of pity for my dumb ass while Alexandre railed at me for going down a one-way into oncoming traffic—it was good we left early or I wouldn’t have been able to get rid of the cunt. But it was “all fyne” as I said, giving it back to him; we made it there with minutes to spare and he hurriedly grabbed his bag from my trunk, shook my hand, then Bambrick’s, then hugged Elizabeth and kissed her with French gusto. Cigarette lit and cloaking his nerves, he trudged off with his tall camping bag on his shoulders and his duffel bags at his sides into the crowds of Manhattan.

***

In a flurry of spontaneity Elizabeth decided to call me the next night when she got off work to ask what I was doing. I was planning to hang out at Poco’s; I brought her there and we watched the recent Hollywood adaptation of On the Road, still obsessively enmeshed as I was with the vast American landscape. During the movie she sidled closer until she was laying on my side; Poco was looking over with autistically obvious eyebrow raises. She asked for a ride home and, idling in front of her house as she interviewed me about my college schedule, she suddenly kissed me and then went inside. Previously my rejector, which in some way launched me through the whole trajectory that was coming to a close, I was now put in the position of choosing whether or not to accept her. As she later said, “I couldn’t bear to see you get away.”