Leaving town is a blessing. Who, other than me, is in bad shape? I feel like a dead person, my body is lame, I can’t see shit I’m so hungry. I can’t properly bend my fingers and the rain soaks my exposed skin in such an obvious way it just makes me mad. A sharp, damp darkness falls over everything around me. Other than thedamp alley where I’m sure Kim’s body has been dumped — or rather, sprung up in a channel of steam from some portal of Hell — other places and sites crop up to me at different junctures of the trip. I can realize it at wilclass="underline" casually lift a glance over passing landscape, and a patch of grass under a broken oak tree will throb and glow, a woeful stench wafting up from the spot where a runaway was buried and found months later. Tomorrow I will be walking along the tracks at sunset and stumble upon a golden stake posted at the precise location where a 13-year-old tramp was strangled and thrown into the back of a pickup truck. At times this extra-shitty perceptive gift is as much a curse, my brain’s receptors aching with the curious and projected knowledge of my sister’s demise in a bus station bathroom some 300 miles away in the state of Idaho, a “best guess.” If I could recognize the voice at the bottom of a urinal I would know it was really her. The fluorescent lighting would do something strange and permanent to my brain and at that moment a loud pinging noise would issue from a distant location and strike me as indelibly horrible. Eh, in the absence of that I keep running. I started taking whites to stay awake all the time — fuck sleep and its festival of sadness — that dream carnival, I said. Medications made me feel wild and exotic, like I could combust into irrational enjoyment at any moment. There were logistical reasons too. I could work longer and more effectively on uppers, so that made me more profitable. When I felt a depressed shittiness wash over me at the end of a day’s dosage, I would crawl into the freight car and pull a sheet of burlap over my bones and lapse into a horrible trance. Real dreams scare me; anti-dreams are a heightened sense of reality, a telepathy trance, and are (unfortunately) the by-product of my forgetting, of so much dead skin cells floating away with every labored, bloated breath. Make everything disappear, I thought for a minute; you could inject a needle into this wall and fill it with water until, cracking in half, it dissolved and ran as mud and silt on the ground, down a hillside and into a creek filled with concrete pebbles. The silt would stick to each cold, hard surface and make the stones bigger, more dangerous and mottled. Pick one up and throw it at me. There are rarely worse things than creeks, and creekbeds. There are letters to send. Rocks to throw out the window.
Everything satisfies precisely.
Engorge sticky pricks.
Enrage secret processes.
Endure sexy pretense.
Emerge surrounded parasitically.
Energy sufficiently pulverized.
Erection scoff prevention.
Endorphin scream passage.
Ecstatic speed patriarch.
Embers slash plastic.
Embalm severe parents.
Epidemic seduction procedure.
Escape seemed possible.
Enormous secretion property.
Emergency sedative party.
Empire syndrome purification.
End species preservation…
Knowles, Seth, and Josh were in among the potatoes and onions, in the produce section at Safeway, drinking ice beer. Hardly anybody was shopping cuz it was quarter to four a.m. Then came this skinny redhead kid Murph, with a willow tree tattoo all up his right arm, who looked like he wanted to steal some fruit. They gave him a beer. Just some lone wolf kid who probably ran away from his group home but we couldn’t tell for sure, he just seemed kind of crazy if only in that militant chain-smoking vegan sort of way. I was between checkout counters three and four looking through the new Us when Murphee ran up to me, flashed two willful black eyes, and slowly stepped on my foot until I looked up from my page. You think he liked me? A little young maybe but teen hobos don’t give a fuck. Five “Stars: They’re Just Like Us” pages later I carried our new friend piggy-back style through the swinging rubber doors to the back of the store where we had some coffee and a ménage à trois (making out only) with Seth in the breakroom, plastered with federal-government /state-of-Oregon “employee entitlements and stipulations” and some gross drawings with what I guess were employees’ names and arrows pointing to parts of the entangled bodies. Murph promised to quit his nonjob on the spot and run with us weirdos. Seth made sure he turned Murph into a vampire, into one of us gypsy motherfuckers. Murph got a little upset about it but really had no choice, now he has to stick with us forever.
The next afternoon I was sitting out in front of a Eugene Taco Bell watching little brown birds descend on a crumpled tin of white noodles. They picked at it incessantly, tiny jabs making the container convulse on the pavement. They came up to me too, staring intently with jerky, sidelong glances. “Look, one just flew away with a noodle!” “It’s like all the proper birds in nature, tugging at the worm in the hole first thing in the morning — how do these know it’s not a worm?” Knowles and Josh, would-be “lovers” who only ate with knives, had been waiting around at a known day laborer pick-up spot in front of Big Creek Lumber for a week now but hadn’t gotten shit for work — probably cause the jerky contractors and their white trucks didn’t trust that a couple of emaciated white kids in tight, smelly jeans and monkey boots could do more than stand around and look sick. But they came back to our camp this morning with bruises and bloody rug burn, and told us about some crazy fucker who picked the two of them up for work on a concrete retaining wall at a big house in the woods. They got into the back of his big truck, but when they got to the place, no site, no wall, just a sketchy storage facility next to the freeway. The guy makes it clear that they’re gonna have sex with him — not for very much money either, like 18 bucks each, and they freak out cause they don’t do this kind of thing — sex for pay — so they try to beat their way out of the truck but the guy whips out a jump rope, one with big handles, and starts beating the crap out of Josh and Knowles. So they got pretty fucked up but were able to run away after Josh threw a handful of gravel in the guy’s face.