It is good to be out of Arkansas, which is probably not the first time that sentiment has been expressed. I was sent there to get my legal status renewed, and to remember why I left the country. After 2 months of shaking cockroaches out of the Cheerios box and writing articles in half an inch of water, this motel in the Texas Panhandle feels like Valhalla. I feel like I've been paroled.
This motel is so great, this bed so clean, the cat so not puking on the floor of the van parked in the driveway of a roach motel full of learning-disabled hillbillies (who are my friends, I befriended all the kids, in their 30s/40s and the guy my age who had a stroke, for real. I shared heartfelt goodbyes and well-wishes. They were sad I was leaving. I will miss them. Befriending them has given me a genuine distaste for the "R" word. They're not stupid people. They just have some anomalies. What a crazy, tense, liberating season),
That I can actually lay down.
Dardanelle, Arkansas
I'm tired of living like a rat, looking for forgotten libraries under a giant pile of school buses. My brains are rusting in a junkyard. I'm tired of writing articles in a cloud of flies and hornets. What was the deal with the hornet, landing like an angel of stupidity on my shirt? They didn't want me at the paper mill. The foremen and hornets alike. Of course it's always mutual. Which is not to say I don't try. Because, y'know, who knows. I've always been more of a cultural indictment than a bum, though. The line between the two is thin. You can slide a scorpion through the crack, and not even touch the sides.
Life is sweet at the edge of a razor.
They flipped on me overnight. I didn't know gaslighting could be so anointed. It was typical, yet weird. The frogs croaked along with the mournful, epic sound of the ice cream man, ringing in my soul like a funeral dirge of joy. The song of the ice cream man is dipped in weird, strawberry pathos. He's actually a she. A cute Mexican chick. Her song was playing in my head one night, the weird little song of the existential elves, over and over in my head. The tune was on a loop, the strangely-sorrowful sound of sugar bells ringing in mellifluous, confectionary torment. It was a pretty heavy song. Last time she rode by, I noticed she switched to Christmas music for the summer. Maybe the angst loop wasn't bringing in enough revenue. Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, just in time for June.
Well, who cares.
Why not.
The van drives like a boxing match. The engine kicks at me like a horse with no gloves. I pushed her up to 90 today. I had to, so that I wouldn't dip below 65 on the next incline, or get stuck behind a passing truck on the next slow-moving escalator to Heaven. I got wedged into the foreign, incomprehensible space behind a normal person, a lawyer or a mother driving like a civilized tourist through the Mad Max outlaw status of New Mexico. I had to tailgate them so the gears wouldn't slip. "I'm sorry, but I can't slow down. It's safer to run you off the road than take my foot off the gas. If you ever go to Dardanelle, you will understand." I put existential ice cream songs in the radiator. I put bananas in the cooling pod. I made myself hoarse, screaming Keats into the windshield. "Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?" I asked the girl at the dumpster. Give me 20 repetitions of Kerouac, and a train to Amarillo. I wiped my face with peanuts.
I did everything I could.
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains
and troubles is to school an intelligence
and make it a soul?”
John Keats
Mattie Ross from True Grit is from a farm near Dardanelle. Which explains her temperament in ways no vengeful execution ever could. The "True Grit Trail" is a real highway, leading out of Dardanelle like a one-way road to freedom. It goes any way you want it to, and really, why should the uncertainty of the terminus dictate the point of origin? Why shouldn't the True Grit Trail begin in the heart of the receiver? Who are the true believers in the mist? Retrievers of the golden pitbull, wading through the concrete?
To whom will mercy be finally extended? Who will survive the incoming bubblegum strike? Man and man alone?
Or man and air-conditioned beast alike?
Texas Panhandle
Well, that's not the story. That's the purging of the story. I will miss my friends and brothers, truly. But that's all I want to say for the everlasting moment. Thanks for calling yesterday. Stay sober. Good luck with the cigarettes. Say hi to the world for me.
Onward,
N
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