The Damned Highway Read Online Free PDF Page A

the youth vote now, thanks to the lowering of the voting age to eighteen, and the black vote, all the more important now that the hoses have been turned off and the police dogs corked fang by fang, and then there are the rest of us—the freak vote. Seventy-two promises to be a tight election, and the candidates are more or less identical—for all the blood on his hands, Richard Nixon isn’t all that different than Gene McCarthy or Ted Kennedy. All of them are swine, and if you believe differently, then you’re just a natural fool. Maybe 20 percent is the typical standard variation amongst mainstream politicians in bloodlust, in savvy, in the extent to which they hie to George Meany instead of General Motors. Enough to build a ziggurat of bodies from dead gooks, instead of a taller pyramid on which to plant their four-year throne and Five-Year Plans. When elections are tight, every vote counts, even the votes that end up chained shut in a ballot box drifting sullenly to the bottom of Lake Michigan.
    Or on a bus driving down the ribbon of highway grown frayed and stained from soot and an industrial century of wind and fire. You get used to it quickly, taking the bus, if you’ve never had the chance to experience Automotive Consciousness. In the car, the world is a Panavision film splayed out ten inches from your nose. You control the vertical; you control the horizontal. The earth itself rumbles under your feet, and you eat up the miles so long as OPEC keeps the IV drip of black-tar gold running. To be without a motor vehicle at this late date means to be less than American, less than human. On the Greyhound, you’re no more human than the bags in the undercarriage. Freight, humble and meek and smelling like last week’s sweat. Greyhound never picks up enough speed for me; in my mind’s eye I can see herds of the sleek gray whippets in V formations on either side of the bus, pacing it and then tearing ahead, howling deep into the night. Instead, we putter along from Podunk to Buttfunk, regurgitating passengers by the Dunkin’ Donuts, by the gas station. Sometimes in front of the bus station, when the burg has sufficient tax base to rate two vending machines, a ladies’ toilet (the men’s are always broken), and a dirty pay phone.
    All the towns we’ve passed are Potemkin villages of the worst sort. At least the clapboard and façades in Russia were designed to follow that great ruler and equestrienne, Catherine the Great. The church steeples and quaint little main streets, the burger joints and roller rinks, the satanic mills positioned right over brown rivers—they exist to fool the inhabitants. “Hootie hoo, you are too real Americans! There is your church; there is your steeple. Step out of line and we’ll kill all the people!” And they vote for it. Every four years, the stupid sheep vote for it. And every fourteen miles the bus wheezes like a dying elephant and spills us out into one of them.
    When the bus lurches to a stop again, I’m in St. Louis, Missouri, and I wonder how that happened. At the pace this bus has been moving, we should still be somewhere in Colorado. What happened to Salina, Topeka, and Kansas City? Have I slept through most of the trip, or have I had a bad reaction to the drugs? Could this be Jack Kirby’s fault? A quick glance at my Moleskine notebook confirms that I’ve been jotting down observations, and although much of it is gibberish, I divine enough to know that we did indeed stop in those cities. Apparently, at one point, I wrote, “Kansas City is made of meat,” with no further frame of reference as to what that might mean. Why did I do this? I don’t know. People are very strange. I check my kit bag and notice that both of my grapefruits are gone, as are both of my pints of bourbon. These facts seem to confirm that I have indeed been on the bus a while.
    I need a drink, and there’s a bar in a strip