The Sky Is Big and Full of Shit
shannon peach
Every word in this office mocks me. My coffee mug, snidely advising me to Carpe Millennium. When was the last time I carpeed anything? My computer screen restates "lusty, hedonistic fruit bomb" in twelve different fonts. I write about wine in order to receive a paycheck that pays the rent for a room I don't particularly like. The older women in the office are practical. They drink decaf. There is talk of my promotion, because I can write things like "lusty, hedonistic fruit bomb" with seemingly boundless enthusiasm. But the faith is gone; the promise equates only more work for me. It's a dirty trick.
Alone in the office, I go online to compulsively check the Nashville Sky Cam. I figure if lusty hedonism is to be found anywhere, it must be in the sweltering poverty of the American South. I envision a land of perpetual barbecue, bare feet, and big hair. Blue eye shadow. My mom always said I had my dad's feet. I think she meant tough. I give thanks for an e-mail from Paul, my only Nashville contact. He used to play bass for the Judybats and now runs a record label called Disgraceland. He sent me a tape of his new band, the Nevers, which convinced me that all the best music is coming out of Tennessee. Is Nashville not the Music City? I have it all figured out: there are three places to run to in this country. If run one must do, then run thou shalt. If to be an actor, to Los Angeles; if to be a writer, to New York; and if to be a musician, to Nashville. That is the way.
I am none of these things.
After work, I find myself purchasing a ticket. Looks like today was my last day. I let them know via e-mail. It doesn't escape my attention that this is a landmark occasion, for I have found a new way to quit.
go, go greyhound
A crush is something to do. I decide to develop one before leaving the downtown bus station. I find someone tall, blondish, and scowling. He has admirable taste in pants. His name could be Jeff. Two of the five Jeffs I have known have been blond. I spend most of the time en route to Los Angeles dreaming of ways I might approach him. "You are far too attractive for this bus," I could say. Or simply, "I like your pants."
At a rest stop near Bakersfield, he begins walking straight toward me. My face advertises shock and horror. He veers sharply to the left. A close call for both of us.
He collects his bag and disappears at the L.A. terminal. I join the snaking coil of people in line for the next connection. An Apache offers me a dollar to save his place in line, peels a dollar from a huge roll of bills, and disappears. "I should have asked for a twenty," I mutter, and the fellow in front of me agrees. He has plenty to say on the subject of bus travel, and I suddenly, inexplicably, become social.
When the Apache returns, we are at the front of the line. We perch atop our luggage and make disjointed conversation. My new friend in front offers me his headphones along with the challenge to identify the music. It sounds like Pantera. It feels like a headache. This kid reminds me of the preteen brat in the movie Welcome to the Dollhouse. He wears a backward cap over his surly face, and a wrist brace peeks out from under the sleeve of a sloppy flannel. He tells me he works at Discount Tire, looking as if he expects me to have heard of it. I'm politely dodging the Bible verses the Apache is slinging my way. He tells me I will make some man a good woman one day. I don't know what to say about that, and tell him so. I insist that it's sexist in some way but can't really prove how. The tire kid is highly amused by this.
It is quite late at night and the tire boy slumps in the seat next to me, declaring, "I don't wanna sit next to no one else." He tells me his name is Jeff. He has already discovered my name by slyly inspecting my ticket. He sleeps curled against my shoulder. Whenever he is jolted out of sleep during the night, he snatches my hand and rubs it vigorously between his. I wonder where he picked up this strange habit. Was it something his mother used to do to comfort him? His hands are dry and scaly. This is a place on my path to self-discovery where I can finally ask myself, "Am I the sort of person who fondles strangers on dark buses?"
taste the heritage
Morning in Phoenix is a brilliant orange. I stumble off the bus and see Jeff waiting for his bag a short distance away. I give him a childish wave, a curling and uncurling of the fingers. He shakes his head slowly and I nod, turning away in search of coffee.
Phoenix is seething with shifty-looking characters. I run into the Apache again. Sober and sickly, he introduces himself as Ernest and immediately begins talking about how he was kicked out of his sober-living home. He's going to see his sister in Houston who doesn't know he's coming. He thinks he has important lessons to teach me. "Honesty is the best policy," he's been saying ever since L.A. When we reboard, he takes the seat next to me and wants to keep talking. I make an effort to stay awake, but really my attention is focused on the scenery outside the window. Arizona is stunning to look at. Far from being desolate, about a million alien varieties of plant life are gracing the landscape, and enormous pink boulders balance delicately atop one another.
Ernest captures my interest when he begins speaking of sweat lodges. He chants quietly, beating a soft rhythm against his thigh. He translates for me, I walk in beauty, I talk in beauty, I sleep in beauty, I dream in beauty, I sweat in beauty, I pray in beauty, I live in beauty, I die in beauty. I doubt it, but I admire the philosophy. He tells me about his travels back and forth across the country, working as a day laborer here and there, picking up and leaving whenever he gets the urge. This I can relate to. I tell him about quitting my job and going to Tennessee for no particular reason. He thinks it is incredible that we have met, two wandering spirits crossing paths at a bus station. He expects an affirmation from me, insisting we must have met in a previous life. I concede that it's possible, yet I'm sure that people like us, people with no tolerance for responsibility, comprise a heftier portion of the population than he seems to think. Each bus, after all, is overloaded.
Among the assortment of things that he carries with him, including an Ernie doll of Sesame Street fame and a huge bottle of women's lotion that he manages to spill on me, a sage plant is folded into a square of leather. He plucks off a couple of leaves and offers them as a token of friendship. I think karma requires me to offer something in return. Ernest then says that "friend" is not a word he uses lightly, because a friend is someone you'd die for. "It's in the Bible." I decide against finding a reciprocal gift.
Ernest leaves me in El Paso. It's 107 degrees, the water tastes terrible, and the coffee comes foaming and sugary from a machine labeled "Cappuccino." Someone has written on one of my bags, "10-31-74, El Paso, TX." And here I am.
I wonder if Texas means anything to me. I have relatives buried here. My dad was born in Lubbock, same as Buddy Holly. The first movie I remember seeing is The Buddy Holly Story, at a drive-in. I slept through most of it. And I sleep through most of Texas. There are a few interruptions, from border patrol and some cops who want us to leave our bags on the bus while a dog sniffs at them. I actually have a knife, but it doesn't get me in trouble.
I'm appalled by the quantities of food people are consuming. At every stop, even if it's only fifteen minutes at a convenience store, they are ordering elaborate meals of cheeseburgers with fries, chili dogs, nachos, gallons of soda, and ice cream. They're bored, I guess. A severe young man in fatigues is murmuring quietly in the dark about his travels in military training. He is talking about families in Brazil and how they don't have any American sense of materialism. They eat beans and drink Coke and are happy to eat and drink together.
In Odessa, I watch the feet trudge by. Velcro sneakers, a fuchsia muumuu swishing above white pumps, some filthy cowboy boots. I notice my feet have swollen to freakish proportions. They resemble two peeled potatoes wrapped in sandals, just like my grandmother's. A sign points toward a meteor crater.
The landscape gets exciting again come Arkansas. I am seeing the country unravel beside me in all of its glorious forms, countless shades of green, trees I can't identify. I think that if I could reach through the window and stretch out my hand to the line of trees bordering the highway, they would brush my palm in a gentle, comforting way. My love for the country rises like heat, and without a way to let it burn, I sit in agony in my narrow little seat wondering if I can make it to the end of the road without screaming.
might as well get mad
It all comes down to this: the heat that I'm constantly burning. It is caused by the friction of my fantasies clashing with what is commonly believed to be reality. Maybe my fellow bus-goers haven't spent their whole lives buried in books, but I know they watch movies and TV, more TV than I do. Maybe they can accept the ugliness; maybe they all have a program built into them that lets them distinguish the differences. Why should they be allowed that survival mechanism, while all the hideousness is revealed to me in Technicolor?
Nashville. Finally, Nashville. It is late, and the skyline is luminous with neon. I'm alarmed by the size of it. I stop to write inside my bag with a purple Sharpie, "9-9-99, Nashville, TN." Today is my half-sister's birthday. She is nine. I barely know her.
I cross the highway to a busy place called Piccadilly Cafeteria. Several elderly gentlemen advise me to get to the front of the line before "this band of old coots get in your way." People here are so friendly. I eat warm gumbo and drink real coffee.
With a couple of hours to kill, I smoke and read from E. M. Cioran's On the Heights of Despair. I feel smugly...
