THE STUPID asshole tried to kill us.
Or is it, ‘It tried to get us killed’?
Good that it didn’t succeed. Thank God! Thank Good Lord Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, Larry, Curly and Moe.
Fucking asshole. Depraved selfish self-centered misarranged asshole.
The neighbors were awake, rushed in, dragged its ass out, called the fire department, covered it up with blankets. Actually duvets. Wool blankets would have done it more harm; they knew as much. Sizzling flesh sucking up millions of wool threads that would’ve been baked deep into the subcutaneous coat. This happening all over the burnt skin, spanning almost the entire body.
Fire department people showed up fast.
The neighbors to the right and left lost most of their apartments to the fire. Homeless for now. Send thank-you cards to the asshole!
The upstairs apartment suffered some damage, too. But minor.
In the local community hospital, in a room with three others, my body lying on a standard hospital bed, with the metal side bars up, the IV drip hanging, tube going to its right arm, all bandaged up like a mummy. Burnt enough to cause long-term daily excruciating pain. GOOD!
They’ll put it on narcotic pain killers. It’ll be addicted to that too now.
It was month after month of nurses coming in to check the drip bag, change the drip bag, feed it through a straw, asking, “How’re we doing, hon?” My body would mumble unrecognizable something and barely nod.
Over the months, skin continued shriveling to nothingness, cracking up, scabs covered with scabs.
As the mummy bandages came off gradually, exposed lower layers of flesh filled with billions of sensory nerves started sensing air movement, temperature drops, flies, and mosquitos. Billions of nerves sensing any molecular movement, things brushing against it, scratching, slapping, accidentally dropping things, pinching, patting.
Exposed sensory nerves are scared to death of any of those. A nurse walking by normally causes air flow. The door to the room opening too quickly, ten feet away, causes air flow. And if a big fat fly should take a fancy to the exposed flesh?
Good! Air flow does it good. The reckless asshole. And for what? A lost fucking J O B?
After six months in the hospital, my body was taken to sister’s house. There, it spent another two months convalescing. The opioid pain killers were replaced by high dose acetaminophens.
Mother and father would visit every week. Mother was all smiles, father not so much. They were both nice. Positivity personified. My body would hear their hushed whispers in the adjacent room though. Whispers spoke loudly; what speculations were they having? But when face to face, they were the picture of positivity, except for father’s stoic face. Always the realist.
Whatever condemnations they hush-talked I did not care. I had to stay objective; I had to not know all the things whispered. Condemnations come from personal prejudices. I had to stay out of it.
Now we’re reunited. For how long? Not the issue. We had to work things out.
Maybe I should not talk to it so much. Maybe it was not just losing the job that drove it to attempted suicide. Maybe it was me berating it too much. I should stay quiet. Not talk aloud so much.
***
THESE DAYS I communicate mostly with inanimate objects. And plants. I also half-communicate with the stray cat I’ve been feeding. It usually does not come too close; only when there’s food. Doesn’t let me pet it. Not even as I put the bowl of food in front of it. For the bowl, it comes close. But no petting. The little Ingrate.
Humans come with baggage. It’s OK to have baggage. I have mine. I just don’t go around unloading it on everybody. But they want to unload it on me. What they want to unload, mostly insane. Some more than others. Truly absurd; and this late in history. I can’t even bring up the subject. They’d think I’m the insane one.
I commune with the trees in the backyard. They are peaceful and understanding.
***
I GOT it a new job. No more construction gigs for my body. It can’t get a job cleaning the porta potties at a construction site. After what it did, the news spread in the industry in the area. It’s a small community. Nobody wanted it around. It might show up to work with a glistening new AR-15 bought in Arizona or something.
It doesn’t have the stuff to do that. But they don’t know that. They just look at it as a profile: unstable and somewhat insane. They’re right in the conclusion. Just not based on premises they invented. My body, in a way, is actually sane. Just misarranged.
Found a prefect posting on an online job site. “Delivery drivers wanted for environmental cleanup company. Valid driver’s license and OSHA certification required.”
I suggested very subtly that driving does not need retraining. All it had to do was get an OSHA certificate for hazardous materials removal and transportation. It was a forty-hour course it could take online. My body has science background, chemistry included. It was easy to complete the course.
It did it in eighty-six hours.
We drive to Gallup, New Mexico, and pick up samples for delivery to a licensed lab in Los Angeles. The cleanup site is an abandoned army depot. In late eighties it was decommissioned, or whatever the correct term is; half the land was returned to the Navajo and the Zuni nations. The whole land used to belong to them.
The site was used for storage and testing of munitions and missiles. Thousands of toxic chemicals blown into the ground, buried deep into the topsoil. A toxic pollutants web singed into the earth’s skin. Before the land goes back to the tribes, it must be cleaned up. Lots of environmental testing is needed, so they know what to clean up. We are the worker ants, one link in hundreds of miles of a chain of activities.
It’s a great job. We see a lot on the road. A lot of it, nothingness. And we get to spend a lot of quality time together.
My body hates quality time together. It fears what I would say.
***
ON THE first run, going from L.A. to Gallup to pick up the samples, my body was nervous.
First time driving a cargo van with no windows in the back, no windows in the cargo section. Only the driver’s side window and the passenger’s side window. The only view of what was behind or next to us was through the sideview mirrors. My body was not used to that.
Driving through L.A.’s freeways with four or five lanes was a nightmare. Cars were passing us on the left, on the right, cutting us off, no signaling, little souped up Hondas, muscle cars with punctured mufflers, luxury sedans and SUVs menacing us. Cars passing and immediately changing into our lane without signaling, like five feet in front of us, and right behind them another one, as if they were in a drag race, engines revving as they passed, their punctured mufflers amplifying the menace. Assholes!
Once you get to Barstow and get on I-40 to head east, civility descends on the road. It’s a two-lane freeway where eighty percent of the vehicles are trucks and big rigs. They keep the order.
We could breathe easy.
The route is mostly gas stations, truck stops, and fast-food chains repeated across hundreds of highway miles, every forty-to-fifty miles. From Barstow, going through the entire northern Arizona, for hundreds of miles before Flagstaff, and after it, desert landscape with short, round, bushes of different shapes and in different shades of brown and hints of green, devastated little structures that have names, as if they’re actual towns or villages, all boarded up; the only working-living things are a few cement factories, a couple of power stations, lots of gas stations, and assorted rock, earth and dirt consuming industrial structures, spitting out dirt-based products. Only two real towns: Kingman with just under thirty thousand people, Flagstaff with just over seventy thousand.
After about ten runs going back and forth, my body had a realization. “There’s never a cop car between Barstow and Needles! No state troopers, no highway patrol, no sheriff cruisers. None!” I kept the news to myself: there’s no restaurants. No IHOPs, no Denny’s, no Cracker Barrels, no Subway sandwich shops, no Chester’s chicken, no Wendy’s, no KFCs, not even a McDonald’s.
***
THERE IS a road, Proving Grounds Road, in Yucca, AZ. Looks like it wasn’t grounds for proving much. A truck-servicing station with a dirt-poor looking village of sorts built around it. Besides the big rig services, all else scraped off; dust brown living shapes move around, bracing themselves from the desert winds, holding their hats tight.
Heading east on I-40, just before Kingman, AZ, a sign reads, Holy Moses Wash. Way farther east, there is a Devil Dog Road. Who names these things?
As you approach Winslow, you see a sign for Two Guns, a previously living village presumably. It’s just two dead structures now. Next you see a sign for Twin Arrows. A casino is all you see from the highway. Closed for the pandemic.
Going farther east, right after Joseph City, another truck-stop, and before you get to Holbrook, you see a sign for Geronimo Rd. Then you see one for Hunt Rd. Then you see a sign for both, at the same exit; at the end of the off ramp, Geronimo Rd. goes north, Hunt Road goes south. Were some settlers pissed off with Geronimo’s name for a road and decided to go hunting? Or Hunt Road came first, and ancient locals were resurrected to bring Geronimo back for a fight?
There is only Romo’s Restaurant visible from the highway. The parking lot seems empty almost every time we’ve passed. How do they stay alive?
***
WE HAVE passed that junction twenty-eight times. Back and forth. Back and forth. Can’t tell what’s alive and what’s dead.
Going farther east there is a sign at a bridge that reads ‘Dead River’. A few miles later, ‘Crazy Creek’.
The entire length of the route, my body is trying to find radio stations to listen to. The stations that come in clearest are God stations. They’re all reproaching, scaring the hell out of their listeners. God is menacing. There are a few country music stations. There’re the Spanish language stations that come in clear, with accordion and horns music, mariachi, merengue, ballads with giant orchestral accompaniments, Spanish language talk stations, and Spanish language pop music that sounds like their white counterparts. My body changes the dial quickly past a couple of rightwing talk radio stations. There is one station that dispenses financial advice. There are a bunch of heavy metal stations with screaming singers and shrieking guitars. Father used to say, “Sounds like someone’s crushing their balls.”
My body gives up the search. Turns off the radio. Five minutes later it switches it back on and the search continues. Can’t stand the silence and the droning sound of rubber on asphalt, the sound of passing big rigs, sounding like angry machines shouting at it. At times, my body leaves the radio on static noise. Lasts about ten minutes, then switches it off. Then on again and the search resumes.
It must be careful about the music. Any fragment of a song melody can get stuck in its head, repeating on an endless loop for days. It must be careful what fragment gets stuck.
At about fifty miles west of Gallup, the landscape gets more interesting. The vegetation grows taller, greener. The road runs over small canyons, medium size mesas on either side of the freeway, all colorful with reds, pinks, and different shades of brown, topped with green vegetation. You see more Indian arts and crafts stores advertised on billboards. There’s the Indian City store, and Knife City Outlet; billboards advertise pottery, jewelry, crafts, and blankets; handmade, the sign says. My body wonders if the Indians infuse invisible diseases into the blankets they sell to the tourists, to us the invaders.
As you get closer to New Mexico state line, the number of Indian arts and crafts and jewelry stores increase. The billboards lure drivers with declarations of the largest selections of Indian arts, crafts and jewelry, and the best prices. The billboards advertise clean restrooms.
By the time we see the signs for Window Rock and the Zuni Pueblo, the mesas grow much taller, a thousand feet tall, their side walls polished by thousands of years of wind and rain. Mostly wind.
The clouds intensify around Gallup. Huge, dramatic clouds, stretching to all horizons, north and south, east and west. Big white cotton balls at the top; flat, light gray bottoms. We saw two rainbows once, forming in the clouds.
As we get out to fill up at gas stations, we get hit with the strong smell of gasoline. Brings back a jabbing pain, the memory of the fire.
***
ON THE road back to L.A., as we approach Barstow, after a thirteen-hour day of driving, big rig trucks are lined up, looking like an unbroken line of illuminated worker ants at night, miles-long chain of red taillights ahead, bright high beams blinding from the opposite direction. Straight lines of them, or in bending columns, as far as the eye can see, in front of us, behind us, going east and west.
FedEx Freight, FedEx Ground, Prime, TFI International, PS Logistics, Penske Logistics, Ryder Systems, Crete Carrier Corp, Mercer Transportation, XPO Logistics, Saia Freight Lines, YRC Freight, Estes Express Lines, Amazon Prime, Old Dominion Freight Line, UPS Freight, Roadrunner Transportation, Swift Transportation, J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Knight Transportation, CR England, Holland, CRST International.
They rule the road.
“They own the world,” my body says.
It has a theory that these guys got together over a weekend and remade the world in their own image. They designed and delivered a world where Logistics, with capital L, dictate the rules for all things on earth: all industries, all trade routes, all the way down to most precise level of infinite dispersion of all economic activities.
“Look!” it says, “Look, a car cannot be produced in just one place anymore. Oh, NO! It must be produced in a thousand different places. All those places need things to make their one thousandth of a car. Those things need to be shipped of course. Then, guess what? ALL those thousand parts must be shipped to one MORE location to be put together! That’s just ONE thing in a million things we need!”
It may have something there.
***
WINSLOW, AZ, population nine thousand or so. The exit to the east part of town directs you to the McDonald’s, and after a mile to the historic downtown. Two blocks of it. A tenth of a New York City block. All brick buildings, two stories tall, red or painted different shades of brown and beige, wind-faded awnings.
The exit to the west part of town leads to a Navajo Arts and Crafts shop on one side, across from a gas station, an EconoLodge Hotel and a Chinese restaurant that is now just a sign. An abandoned shack-looking structure next to the Chinese restaurant is all boarded up. The white-painted wood covering the front door and windows has someone’s graffiti: “I love Rez”, a heart shape instead of the word ‘love’. Next to it, “All Rize Matters!” with a raised fist holding a feather.
The whole place looks post-historic.
Driving past Winslow, heading west, three hours before sunset, we see the new moon. The thinnest sliver of the moon hanging thirty degrees above the west horizon. It’d be setting an hour or so after sunset. Orion was up in the eastern sky, behind us. By the time we were approaching Barstow, the trio making up Orion’s Belt was in the west sky, in our view.
***
THE BIG rig drivers are the best drivers on the road. You can shadow them and be one hundred percent safe. If a car or truck has pulled over on the right shoulder, with hazards blinking, and even when not blinking, the truckers switch to the left lane, giving the pulled-over guy space.
The non-professionals, the tourist roaders, 90% of them with Californian plates, the luxury sedans, muscle cars, Jeeps and SUVs, the incurable high-octane stressed types, always in a hurry, heedless fucks switching lanes at a hundred miles an hour not signaling, overtaking on your right, zigzagging between lanes ... They don’t observe protocol. They’re the un-masked in a pandemic, spreading irritants with abandon. Parasitic vermin.
As had happened twenty-eight times before: as we drove past Barstow and joined I-15 south, and as the two-lane freeway turned into a five-lane highway, the menacing speeders materialized out of nowhere and commenced with their menacing.
My body had a look of emerging notions forming in its head. Looked more like the notions were hatching my body. About what to do about the road pests. I was nervous but kept my mouth shut.
It was too quiet, just sneering; not swearing and cursing at the road irritants.
As we saw the spread-out city lights of Victorville in the valley below, my body said out loud, as if making a declaration: “New moon leads Orion by a thousand miles.”
Was it reporting a conclusion after repeated observations, like a Eureka moment after twenty-eight times of mental notetaking? Or was it insinuating something hatched in its twisted head?
You never know what’s meant to be until it happens. Not sure I want to find out.